Analects - good book to practice chinese reading?

[daphnis]

Hi,
I've just reserved "Analects" bilingual edition translated by "James Legge" in a store, and I'm asking opinions about buying it.

I'm interested in learning to read specially old/classical chinese literature, and I'm in doubt most about the language that the Analects use. Is it a close chinese to many other classical literatures? I'm asking because some times the most "foundating" books of some cultures tend to use an archaic language even when compared to classical literature (like Homer for greek or the Vedics for sanskrit).

So, you think it's a good chose to practice reading?

Thanks. Xie xie ni.

[OldBoring]

If by Analects you mean Confucius, that's THE Classical Chinese language, that Chinese writers took as a model until the popularization of Vernacular Chinese in the early 20^th century.

[daphnis]

Wow, really? Then I'm happy.
I ended up buying it before reading your message.
It seems a great book to have anyway, with the original chinese.
But trying to read it, once I figured it must be read from top to bottom right to left (took me a lot of time to be sure of it ), I'm quite being capable of understanding, slowly, the original text.

I don't know what I'll do about the pronunciation, but my idea is really to try to learn reading chinese without caring for pronunciation, at least at first. The pronunciation Legge puts at some parts of the book (and at the dictionary at the end) is not Mandarin(which I studied), I suppose it's Cantonese.
Ah, the book is great, Chinese in really readable characters, translation, lots of commentaries, dictionary at the end, read it from top to bottom and you won't regret

I have another question. Does anyone have the bilingual edition of Zhuang Zi white black&white images and calligraphy text by Jane English and Gia-fu Feng?

http://www.amazon.com/Chuang-Tsu-Chapte ... +bilingual

I'm interested in buying, it seems very nice, but I would buy online and Im afraid the calligraphy of the characters is too stylized in order that it's beautiful but difficult for a foreigner to read.
I could only find little images of the book, and, at least in small size, the calligraphy looked more like haragana/katakana to me than chinese characters. But maybe it was distortion of the image.

[OldBoring]

The pronunciation Legge puts at some parts of the book (and at the dictionary at the end) is not Mandarin(which I studied), I suppose it's Cantonese.

Maybe it's Mandarin in Legge romanization?

[Bubulus]

James Legge's translation of the Analects is from 1861, so the transcription might even be mid-19th century Mandarin too.