Romance of the Three Kingdoms

[Sapphire-Worm]

This book is an absolute must have, it is a very interesting and full of interesting history, but it is a book, that was writen by Luo Guanzhong...and since I am new to this site, if this thread has been started by someone, forgive me, this is my first post, but this is a must have book.

[maya]

what a shame! i am a Chinese and i haven't read the book yet. too many characters and different time always make me confused. sometimes if a person didn't read a book in his childhood, he will probably have no chance to start it later. for example, i cannot say i will read David Copperfield now if i haven't read it before.

[Sapphire-Worm]

Well, you can always read it in the site, or DL the e-book, its in English and it is very good...read it

[Edmond]

It is never to late to read anything, a masterpiece Like "The Romance of Three Kindoms" can amuse the young and the old, no matter what age you are in, you will find the book amusing.

[maya]

thank you all!

when i was a kid, my mother borrowed many books from the library for my preliminary reading lesson, however, many of them are foreign literature, such as gadfly, the insulted and injured. one day, i got an old book named: the red mansion. so many characters in it confused me. i found it was so boring and so long. the bad impression suspended my reading from this book to the three kingdom. although it's difficult for me to pick up it again, i think i d better find some time to start reading it.

[someone]

Hey can you try this site out. Its another forum (I dont know if I can do this one this forum) but it talks about Romanc eof the three kingdom and need more people on it. So can you just try it out because it can be a good site if you give it a chance.

[Ishabak]

I'm a huge fan of the Romance, although I do take issue with several of its aspects. Mostly, Luo's portrayal of Liu Bei as some kind of virtuous hero when he was nothing more than a murdering bandit. Cao Cao was the real hero.

[crystalmoonshin]

I haven't read the entire book, not much time for that now since I'll be doing my thesis next school year and I have to prepare for it this semester, but I have more or less an idea of what it's about, since my father is a big fan of it. (He's not a voracious reader but he likes Romance of the Three Kingdoms very much and we sometimes argue because I'm a fan of Dream of the Red Mansions...) Anyway, I've read some parts of the novel in my Chinese class when I was in high school. I'm planning to read the entire book after I graduate.

[JBI]

How hard is the Chinese, in terms of number of characters? Lots of archaic, and seldom used ones, or pretty much the same as everything else?

[crystalmoonshin]

I studied Chinese for 10 years and it's still not enough if one wishes to really engage in Chinese literature. We were taught the basics in elementary, and come high school, we're already writing essays, movie reviews and such. But all using the informal style. The important thing's still expressing one's own ideas and sentiments.When I tried to read poems in Chinese which are not discussed in class, I'm not so sure of my interpretations. That's how difficult a language Chinese is. (And one really has to know how to read thousands of characters.)

[JBI]

So the 4000 they say are needed for virtually full literacy won't allow one to read, for instance, a classical poem, assuming the characters learned are traditional, and not simplified.

[crystalmoonshin]

Actually, 4000 is already a lot! The problem is that in that 10 years I’ve studied Chinese, I think I’ve only learned around 1500 characters. I remember my Chinese teacher saying that to be able to fully survive in China, one has to master at least 2500 characters. And the greatest difficulty, for me, is that one character can have multiple meanings based on the word beside it, be it left or right.

To add, I think I’ve wasted my parents’ money and also my time when I was in high school coz I wasn’t at all serious with my Chinese lessons. I always slept in class heehee. It’s just that learning by rote memorization does not interest me, but I would understand later on, that it was to fully master the Chinese characters.

But you see, I was even included in the honor roll both in my elementary and high school years without any effort on my part and more than half of my classmates are pure Chinese, meaning they really come from China. So now, I’m spending some of my time (if I am privileged to have the time since I’m busy with school work and my part-time job.) reading Chinese poetry and trying to make some sense out of everything. Of course, reading Dream of the Red Mansions (which I read in English, of course) helped me a lot coz I was kinda given a brief lesson on what a typical Chinese poem would be about.