Brendan,

Thanks for the rundown. Plenty enough here to make an honest start of it.

But the rub: from the perspective of being interested in contemporary Chinese lit/thought, do y'all think it's WORTH learning classical? My guess is that the learner of classical Chinese has an increased ability to access texts that are in the water, so to speak, of everything proceeding afterwards, in the same way that having read the King James can familiarize much art far afield. Or, to better comprehend contemporary lit, should I just read MORE contemporary lit?