Listen I can't even title a fanfic

Every time something about modern Chinese media or politics depresses me I get a bit meh and unmotivated about learning the language - which isn't anyone's fault unless I suppose they're one of the committee members who decided BL media should be verboten, but here we are. I don't know what any of it says about me or my reasons for learning and whatnot, but it's probably best not to worry too much: learning languages is such a long term and psychologically obscure and strange process that whatever you need to leverage to keep putting one foot in front of the other is probably fine even if it's a bit weird. 

Anyway I am and have been for some time pretty absurdly into Classical Chinese, so now that my eyes and neck aren't quite as bad as they were the last time I tried that, I've been wandering with reasonable dedication through A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese, which is by approximately a million miles the best book on the subject that I've encountered. Actually, it's so good that I'm annoyed by proxy at all the terrible textbooks that exist. 

I'd say I can't believe I'm going through a textbook doing the exercises for fun, but if you had known me in school this would actually be the least surprising thing about me and my life right now.

I don't quite know what's useful and/or interesting enough to actually put on this journal, but I'll leave you with: the current chapter I'm working on features the example text "Guan Zhong Arrives Late" (管仲後至) where he wanders in (to court, it seems?) late, throws away half his wine, and cheerfully jokes 酒入舌出 - "wine in, tongue out" ie, when you drink wine, you talk rubbish - which is a proverb that ought to have persisted if it hasn't.

The first few chapters were reasonably short proverbs, but from here on out we've got paragraph-length excerpts with a fair few cultural/historical notes, which I'm excited to get to - especially Unit 2, which is made up of excerpts from the "Biographies of Assassin-Retainers" chapter of the 史記/Shiji. I'm also putting a lot of the sentences into anki, both so that I'll remember the new-to-me characters and so that I'll absorb the grammar and structure.

As a neat bonus, I'm losing my overwhelm/intimidation when faced with traditional characters very fast. Apparently what I really needed to do was just get up to my elbows in them and use them to make some sentences in the exercises.