<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. 

<h4>One character, lots of meanings</h4>
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. 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. 

<h4>Extremely condensed language</h4>
I know this sounds kind of dippy, but I find I have to approach reading ancient Chinese in a different way. I have to set aside my need for specificity. I have to let each character kinda wash over me and paint part of a picture, then infer the meaning of the sentence from the picture that's been painted. Try it - try relaxing your mental grip on the language a little, drift with it. Maybe it'll help, maybe I just need to lay off the educational dowsing rods or whatever.

听其言而信其行


<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 