Does it make sense to start reading 红楼梦 as a beginner?
...an exercise in microscopically slow reading.
Once in a while I despair at my slow progress in learning Mandarin. I think about pausing or stopping my lessons. I re-activate abandoned language learning apps. I jump from one thing to another.
When reality bites you have an opportunity to question and to reconstruct your reasons, your motivation, your outlook. Am I on auto-pilot, do I really want to do this?
This time I was drawn back to the idea that good input is the most important factor for language learning.1 It’s a comforting theory: If you can find good inputs and study them, you’ll make progress. It feels true.
I also remembered one of my aims, which is to read 红楼梦.
I should start now. Why wait to read 红楼梦 until I’m able to? I’d need to reach HSK5++ to start recognising enough characters to read a sentence off the bat. Who knows how long that might take.
In the mean time, 红楼梦 is input that I’m interested in. It might not be easy input, but who would argue about it being good input? And there’s technology to help. Large-Language-Model tools could assist to make the input useful.2
I will have to work in microscopic increments and I may never finish, but who cares? Life is a work in progress, and reading should be too. One shouldn’t read a book with the aim of finishing it.
While rediscovering my inclination to believe in the input theory of language acquisition, I came across a conversation between Stephen Krashen and Noam Chomsky. More motivation if it was needed to start this journey.
Language isn’t really learned it just grows in the mind, it’s something that develops naturally, automatically, along a fixed programme that is biologically determined… it’s almost like learning to walk, you don’t learn to walk, it just comes automatically… you don’t know the rules, you couldn’t know the rules… you do it because it’s interesting.
It has to be interesting. For a young infant, picking up the language is just an interesting, exciting thing, so it happens automatically. Children at the peak period will pick up a word every waking hour. It’s interesting to them, they want to understand what’s going on. They have an internal rich structure of mind, which goes into operation with very limited stimulus and leads to rich understanding, and that’s true all the way through life. It’s also true when you’re in college let’s say….
There’s several models of how to do it. One is the model sometimes called “pouring water into a vessel and then having it come out in a test.” We’ve all had experiences like that where you took a course in college and you weren’t interested in it and you studied for the exam and you got an “A” and two weeks later you forgot what the course was about… That’s one way of so-called teaching, teaching to test.
The other way is to pursue something you’re interested in. And then it will just become part of you. You pursue it on your own initiative, with your own internal drive, answer the questions that you yourself are raising. Just becomes part of you.
… Just like an infant constantly asking why… Well it’s pretty much the same with language acquisition… Things just develop in the mind if you create an environment that’s interesting and stimulating.
… the way to gain rich understanding not only of the language but also of the society around you, of other people, history and so on, is by reading. Reading has very sharply declined… Reading enriches your life, your understanding, your outreach, your creativity.3
One of the questions for works like 红楼梦 is which version to use. Take Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. One can get a 7,000+ page Pléiade edition featuring sketches, drafts, and alternative versions around a core text.4 Alternatively, there’s the version on Gutenberg.org.
A little bit of browsing led me to the following version of 红楼梦. It’s available online for free and it seems to incorporate notes and commentary.
Version: 红楼梦脂评汇校本 版本:3.13(2009.7.20.) 曹雪芹著/脂砚斋评 Kolistan 汇校整理、制作 抚琴居红楼梦文学社区发布。Available here, direct download.
I asked a Large-Language-Model-based tool to scan the book. It tells me there are about 20,000 sentences in the edition. Supposing this is accurate, then to finish the book in thirty years I need get through 12 sentences a week.
I’ll begin with an aim of three sentences a week. I’ll start with the preface titled: 脂砚斋重评石头记凡例.
重评 (chóngpíng):to re-evaluate, assess
石头记 (shítóu jì): story of the stone, stone records
凡例 (fánlì): notes/guide for a book
One of the reasons for writing this ‘newsletter’ is a sense that it’s important to keep developing one’s reflections, and to see if these reflections stay consistent or diverge over time. Here’s a previous set of notes including a reflection on input-focused learning.
Here’s a perspective I found interesting (YouTube Link).
DALL-E3: A photo capturing the essence of a learner embarking on the challenging journey of studying the Chinese language and literature, specifically 'Dream of the Red Chamber' (红楼梦). The image shows a person standing at the beginning of a long and winding path that stretches into the horizon, symbolizing the lengthy and complex process of learning that lies ahead. The path is filled with representations of various challenges and achievements, such as steep hills, valleys, and occasional rest stops with Chinese books and scrolls to represent learning milestones. The journey is set in a serene landscape that conveys a sense of peace and determination. In the distance, the path leads towards a traditional Chinese pavilion, symbolizing the cultural enrichment and knowledge gained from this endeavor, which may take decades to achieve.
Noam Chomsky in conversation with Stephen Krashen, Link to YouTube recording.
For a critical view of this project, see: The Threat to Proust by Roger Shattuck, and the heated replies, for example:
It is also misleading for Shattuck to weigh against our bulky Pléiade two tractable paperbacks—published by Garnier-Flammarion and Laffont-Bouquins—which are not critical editions—while he chooses to ignore the commensurate Folio paperback, the popular offshoot of the Pléiade, with minimal annotation, no variants, but the same text and pagination. Simply put, the issue is not whether amateurs should boycott the Pléiade, but whether we need a critical edition of the Recherche at all, or of any other great modern novel for that matter. Whether scholars ought to be cognizant of critical editions. Whether critical editions should be the ones referred to in scholarship. Obviously, this is a free country: one is at liberty to cherish one’s old Remington and boycott Microsoft.