Just curious--how do you read it? As an English speaker who reads Chinese pretty well but struggles with Japanese (I'm doing Classical Japanese now), I am convinced that an English speaker with good Japanese could learn Chinese very easily--more easily than reading it as Kanbun. Even if you don't know the yomikata.

Normally, I stare at the Chinese for a while, think I get it, and then read the "Chinese in Japanese" version and realize that I didn't quite. Books that also have a "modern (real) Japanese" version are a bonus.

I do get the feeling that learning to read Chinese at this point, with, say, 75% comprehension of "proper" grammatical sentences, wouldn't be all that difficult... but I haven't put that theory to the test yet.

By the way, does that mean you're learning Classical Japanese without going through Modern Japanese? That's intense.

I speak Japanese, but pretty poorly even after living in Japan for a couple years. For whatever reason, Chinese was always a snap for me and within about the same amount of time (in Taiwan) I was fluent. Maybe because I learned it first, maybe I was more motivated, I don't know. Classical Japanese class is in Japanese, and the instructor is kind enough to write the kanji when needed so I know what she's talking about. She also speaks English and Chinese very fluently, so that helps when I am really in a jam. Next semester, when we get to Kanbun, I will exact my revenge on my unwitting classmates.My theory, though, is that any Japanese person who reads a lot of Kanbun will start to skip the diacritical marks ("yomikaeri"?) and begin to read it as ersatz Chinese, and that that process would be even easier for an English-speaking foreigner. I mean, mash English and Japanese together and you have something like Chinese.

By the way, 自由自在 is a pretty common compound in Chinese, even in modern speech. Yahoo Taiwan's dictionary has it as:1.leisurely and carefree; free and unrestrained; footloose and fancy-free; (as) free as the air; (be) on the loose2.to take one's ease; to be at one's ease; to be at liberty

Yeah, it's a strange feeling sometimes when I drag some Chinese through the Kanbun filter into Japanese and my understanding, then realize that the original word order was basically the same as an equivalent English sentence.

The teachers I've known who were good at reading kanbun still read things smoothly in Japanese order, but it seemed like they could take in a whole sentence and convert it in their head without consciously making all the kaeriten-indicated order switches.

自由自在 isn't uncommon in modern Japanese, either.. it escaped from the jargon bucket. But since Iriya avoided using 自由 altogether, I'm pretty sure Asahina intended the original meaning, without the modern ideas that have become attached to 自由. ...Pretty sure.

By the way, your profile isn't public -- do you blog too?

For this reason, in the Edo period there were apparently people (Ogyu Sorai is one) who advocated skipping all the diacritical marking systems and weird yomikatas and just learn to read Chinese as Chinese. They promoted Ming and Qing dynasty novels as literature to be read to learn Chinese as a living language rather than the language of the dead Confucian males. Thus the reception these books got in Japan was (apparently) much different than in China. Seems to me like an alien civilization comes to Earth and deifies Stephen King. Anyway, that is what I am interested in checking out. You probably know more about that than I do. I'm primarily a Sinologist, but I'm pretty interested in Japan. Not to mention, Japan is a much nicer place to live or stay than China. Kyoto or Beijing? No contest. So I want to have that option open.I had a blog for about 15 minutes a few years ago--it lasted about three posts, and then a six-months-later "wow it's been a long time" post. My login was still saved in my Firefox browser so when I went to post comments it came up automatically. I have been thinking of getting it going again recently. If I do, I'll let you know. It's nice to throw ideas around with people more knowledgeable about Japan than I am.自由自在 is so common I didn't realize it started as jargon. One thing I love about classical Japanese (and now classical Japanese) is how something perfectly ordinary appears in a really old text. I get the same feeling when I find people from 100s of years ago with English names that sound like they could be my neighbors.

I hope you will start blogging again, if that means writing about classical Japanese, Chinese, and stuff like that. I still miss isfogailsi's take on such things, and she gave up her blog, what, two years ago now?

Huh, no, I'd never heard of that before, but it sounds like something Edo-period people would do. They were full of crazy ideas.

Even if you knew Edo-period Chinese, wouldn't you still have a hard time reading the really, really old texts? Or does that only apply to the extremely obtuse ones?

LH: I know, and I only discovered it just when it was winding down. Sometimes I manage to lure her (I think it's her) here with posts about Manyoushuu-period poetry, but it's just not the same.

My experience was the opposite of snake's: I struggled with Chinese in uni and then switched to Japanese my first year in grad school; I felt I made more progress in that first quarter of Japanese than I had in the preceding three years of Chinese. (Of course, it was a summer intensive course and we did a year of work in ten or so weeks. I also nabbed my first Japanese iki-jibiki (her phrase) around that time, if that has anything to do with it...ahem.)

We did a bit of kanbun in a Classical Japanese class at OSU, to familiarize us with the system of marks, but I've always found it easier to just try and read it as (Classical) Chinese. Not that I try to read it that often, mind you.

Snake here, changed my user name back to what I usually use elsewhere out of habit based in obscure reasons. Thanks for the encouragement, Languagehat. I started a new one up at http://amidaworld.blogspot.com/, yoroshiku. Forgive the rudimentary layout, etc., for now. I will post about classical Japanese next.