<h3>Why ancient Chinese is so friggin' hard</h3>
Yeah, the vocabulary is different. There are some tools and titles that don't exist anymore, and ya gotta learn what those words mean to understand the text. But honestly, by the time you hit. So vocab isn't really what makes ancient Chinese so hard. No, what makes it hard is, well, read on:


<h4>Extremely condensed language</h4>

听其言而信其行

In modern Chinese, we very often see words constructed of two characters. Those two characters together lend the word a lot of specificity. But in ancient Chinese, the language is extremely condensed. Very often, words are only one character long. Consider this sentence, which is from Confucius' Analects:

听其言而信其行

First, let's break the sentence down - I've filled in the easier bits and the hardest bits:

听 - Listen to
其 - his
言 - ??
而 - and then
信 - ??
其 - his
行 - ??

Uh oh. There are three characters in here that have kind of ambiguous meanings. 言? Is that 语言 (language)? 方言 (regional dialect)? 预言 (prophecy)? In this case, it's more like 言语, meaning "words", or "what one says". So now we've got:

听 - Listen to
其 - his
<strong>言 - words</strong>
而 - and then
信 - ??
其 - his
行 - ??

Okay, 信 is a little easier to guess. This is sometimes used as a single character in modern Chinese today, it means "to believe" or "belief". So we can infer here:

听 - Listen to
其 - his
言 - words
而 - and then
<strong>信 - believe</strong>
其 - his
行 - ??

But 行? 行走 (to walk)? You may be able to guess  . 

And that's an easy example. It can get really ridiculous with the abbreviated language. So ridiculous, in fact, that it's nearly impossible to pinpoint exactly what the original was trying to communicate. Perfect example? The Dao De Jing, which, if we are to believe some translators, begins like this:

<blockquote>"The Dao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Dao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.”</blockquote>

And according to others, like this:

<blockquote>"The Providence which could be indicated by words would not be an all-embracing Providence, nor would any name by which we could name it be an ever-applicable name."</blockquote>

Or maybe like this:

<blockquote>"The Principle that can be enunciated is not the one that always was. The being that can be named is not the one that was at all times."</blockquote>

You wanna see the original Chinese? Here it is, all 12 characters of it: 

<strong>道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。</strong>

Let's break it down:

道 - The way
可 - can
道 - the way
非 - not
常 - very
道 - the way. 

名 - Name
可 - can
名 - name
非 - not
常 - very
名 - name. 

Uhhh... embellish much? And that's why there are over <a href="http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/tao-te-ching.htm" target="_blank">100 different translations of the Dao De Jing</a>, chapter one, and also why none of them can possibly succeed in bringing out any more clarity in the original text without sacrificing its simplicity. The original is as simple, and pure, and open to interpretation, as it's possible to get. 


<h4>One character, lots of meanings</h4>
Here's another element of complexity: Modern Chinese is pretty forgiving in the sense that most words only have one very specific meaning. There are exceptions, of course, but you rarely have to run down a big list of definitions in order to determine which one applies. 

Ancient Chinese is the opposite. What makes it so incomprehensible is that many of the super important core grammatical words have multiple - we're talking like, 7 or 8 - very different meanings and applications. I spend a lot of time running down lists of definitions for the same character trying to figure out exactly which “之” I'm dealing with. 

Plus, the same character can be both a noun and a verb, and though the character would be pronounced differently depending on whether it's referring to an action or an object, there's no way to tell from looking at it. Let's take, for example, the humble 担。In ancient Chinese, if this is pronounced [pinyin] DANZI[/pinyin], then it's referring to a noun, a 担子, which is a carrying pole that lays across the shoulders with a bucket hung at either end, typically used for hauling water or whatever. But if the same character is pronounced [pinyin] DANZI[/pinyin], it refers to a verb - the <em>action</em> of carrying something across the shoulders, "to shoulder". How do you know which one, huh? Well, practice, really. 

[PIC OF A DANZI]. 

So, those are the tough bits. Now that you know what you're getting yourself into, if you're ready to keep reading, I'll talk some specifics. 


<h3>Some basic principles of ancient Chinese grammar</h3>

<h4>Changing the tone changes words from verb to noun</h4>
担 - to shoulder something

<h4>Conversations and Dialogue: 曰， 谓， 对</h4>

<h3>Ah!</h3>

<h4>Me / You / He / she / it / WTF</h4>
Fun fact: you know where the Chinese word 她 (she) comes from? It comes from a love poem from the 1920s. That's right. The Chinese word "she" was invented less than 100 years ago. Before that, there <i>was no female-gender-specific word</i> for "that person over there". Up until 

吾， 其，君，子，

<h3>The Big Baddies of Ancient Chinese Grammar: 为，而，之</h3>
I guess they just had less words then or something, but th. 
<h3>为</h3>

<h3>而</h3>

<h3>之</h3>



Oh man, the 