"Where is the cow?"

I am half way through my eight-week course on classical Chinese at the Confucius Institute, housed in the Leong Center for Chinese Studies at the Ateneo de Manila University. The class is part of the first batch of courses being offered by the Institute, which is the Chinese government’s educational and cultural arm, much like the British Council, the Goethe Institut and the Alliance Francaise.

There are nine of us in class, led by Confucius Institute director Dr. Ellen Palanca, who is also an economics professor at the Ateneo. Our teacher is Prof. Clark Alejandrino, a most patient and most pleasant young man (he is only 26 years old), who hardly looks like a person one would expect to be an expert in the arcane classical language. Prof. Clark specializes in Chinese history, and it is this specialization that led him to the study of classical Chinese–he had to know it to be able to read the ancient Chinese texts, which in book form run page after page after page without a single punctuation mark.

But the lack of punctuation is only the beginning of the challenge of classical Chinese. I have discovered, in four Saturday morning classes, that adjectives can be verbs, pronouns can be verbs, a word can have four meanings, and three simple characters about where the cow is is actually an entire philosophical discourse (the above title is from the philosopher Mencius). Sentence structures change about as often as word meanings and usage, and one mispositioned character can mean that you’re a parent-eating cannibal.

It has been eons since I’ve been in school, since my little round head has been challenged to absorb so much in so little time. Prof. Clark very kindly encourages us by saying it’s only play (mercifully there are no exams and no grades), and very patiently reviewing lessons already taught but constantly forgotten, and inspiring us with the prospect of Tang poetry sometime in the future when–in my case I should say if–we get a working grasp of the language.

One valuable thing I have learned is that min nan hwa or Fookienese–which was the first language I learned–is really closer in pronounciation to classical Chinese than pu tong hwa or Mandarin, which only became the official language in the Ming Dynasty when the capital was moved up north to Beijing. Maybe I should start a signature campaign to make Fookienese the national language....