Chinese through Poetry: An Introduction to the Language and Imagery of Traditional Verse

Barnes, A.C.: Chinese through Poetry: An Introduction to the Language and Imagery of Traditional Verse.

This posthumously-published volume by a professor at Durham University in England strikes me as a pedagogical masterpiece. I worked my way through it while living in Vietnam, writing out the end-of-chapter exercises in a series of little green notebooks. Together with Cai’s books and Paul Kroll’s A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, it’s one of the books that people studying on their own really shouldn’t do without.