How to Read Chinese Poetry

Designed to work with the popular course text How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology, yet very much a stand-alone resource, the How to Read Chinese Poetry Workbook introduces classical Chinese to advanced beginners and learners at higher levels and teaches how to appreciate Chinese poetry in its original form. Featuring one hundred best-known, easy to recite classical Chinese poems, the Workbook presents China's major poetic genres and themes. Each of the volume's twenty units contains four to six poems in Chinese, English, and tone-marked pinyin romanization, plus extensive vocabulary notes and prose poem translations in modern Chinese. Subsequent literary comprehension questions identify and interpret the artistic aspects of the poems, and exercise units vigorously revisit modern Chinese words, phrases, and syntax while testing readers' grasp of classical Chinese. A complete glossary cross-references classical and modern Chinese usage, characters and compounds, and multiple character meanings, and online sound recording is provided for each poem -- as well as its prose translation -- free of charge. Rounding out the volume are a list of literary issues discussed in the volume, along with a list of phonetic transcriptions for entering-tone characters, which are used in Tang and Song regulated shi poems and lyric songs.