Hi guys;

I've been looking for some time now for a version of the Dao De Jing (and/or other classics) in modern, simplified Chinese with grammar, vocabulary etc I could understand or learn. In other words, a version a modern Chinese person could read with no trouble. I'd love to read in the original, but I can't figure out how 道可道非常道 means anything like 可以说得出的道，就不是永恒的道. *source: http://book.sina.com.cn/nzt/fin/yufuguanlixue/37.shtml

I'm a beginner but I think the best way to improve is by biting off more than you can chew--有人能帮助我吗？

－－Ｄａｖｉｄ

I completely agree with that attitude.

I don't know much about that, but on the same subject, is there a good online
(or otherwise) translation to "Romance of the Three Kingdoms?"

Thanks

http://www.threekingdoms.com/download.htm

michel

I worked on this line for about a week while I was in China last year. I read a bunch of translations and asked everyone I talked to for their interpretations. Turns out we foreign devils are not the only ones who have trouble with it. My Chinese informants generally understood it to mean that "the Dao (or Tao) one can know (or explain) is not the real Dao." But they had a very hard time explaining how that meaning could be extracted from the six characters of the original.

My tutor, embarrassed that she was stumped the first time I asked her about it, did some research and finally came up with an explanation that made some sense to me. Turns out "feichang" has nothing to do with the modern meaning of "very." Rather, according to her, "fei" here means "not", and "chang" means "lasting" or "eternal".

Of course, as happy as I was to solve this little riddle, it didn't get me a whole lot closer to knowing exactly what "dao" is--but I guess that's the whole point...

--David

Isn't 'dao' the TAO ?

你好请问 您贵姓我姓李你呢我姓王叫王朋你叫什么名字我叫李友

"He who knows does not say. He who says does not know. The tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao"

from :
http://eawc.evansville.edu/essays/carson.htm

michel

Thanks David! I had no idea about the old meanings of fei and chang. I guess it's a mistake to think that classical Chinese and modern Chinese are the same languages, just because the characters have been preserved. I wonder if there's a resource to help readers (wannabe readers ) of modern Chinese approach classical texts?

Yes, but what Tao is, precisely, remains something of an open question!

Very interesting.

Chinese has been used for over five thousands years. The language keeps changing, pronunciation, meaning and how to write. In gerenal, there is WEN YAN and BAI HUA. Wen Yan is formal writing Chinese, mostly for government documents, history, even letters to relatives. Bai Hua is people's daily speach, easy to understand. So for us, Chinese, we have to go through 12 years education with so many different types of articles, to really make a sense of both type. Still, sometimes it's hard for us to completely understand the Wen Yan.

Depend on what your target is, you may just need to master Bai Hua.

My Chinese friends have long insisted that Chinese “has no grammar.” Of course this isn’t true of modern Chinese, but it has always seemed to me to be true of ancient Chinese! A highly regarded resource in English for all major texts of Chinese philosophy is Wing-tsit Chan’s A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, now available as an E-Book. It provides characters for names and important concepts. On the Daodejing’s first section, Chan wrote that Laozi “rejected names in favor of the nameless.” Think of this in contrast to Confucius’ insistence on “the rectification of names.”

I took a class called Great Books of China at the University of Michigan. We read Chinese classics such as Monkey, Art of War, Daodejing, Tower of Myriad Mirrors, etc. It was interesting to read the stories in English after I heard the stories in Chinese when I was little. Some of the translations made the story less beautiful than it actually was in the original language. It's a shame that some culture gets lost in translation (no pun intended).