"Spring Dawn" Classical Poem | Learn Chinese Now

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[reading poem]

Hi everyone today we are going to look at
another Tang dynasty poem

this one is from the acclaimed
powered Meng Haoran,

who lived from 689 to 740 AD.

the title of this poem is Chuan Xiao or spring dawn

here's the first line: Chuan mian bu jue xiao.

so "chuan" means spring and "mian"
is a classical way of saying sleep

so the first two characters can be
translated as spring sleeping,

but in English would change that to sleeping
in the spring now the next three characters.

"bu" is a negative word meaning no or not.

then we have "jue" which means
to feel and "xiao" means dawn.

so these three together mean not feeling
or not noticing the dawn.

and for the whole line we can translate it as
sleeping in spring not feeling the dawn

this refers to the author sleeping so
soundly that he didn't notice that dawn had arrived.

now the line two: Chu chu wen ti niao

so the character "chu" means place and when
you repeat it twice means every place or everywhere.

this is a standard grammar structure in
classical and modern Chinese.

other examples are "ren ren" which means
everyone and "nian nian" which means every year.

now back to the poem.

the next three characters of this line are
"wen" which means listen or hear.

and the composition of this character is interesting:

it has the character for door- men on the outside
with a character for ear- er on the inside,

like someone standing at the door listening with
a ear to what is going on on the other side.

then we have the character "ti" which means to twitter.

so we're not talking about posting 140 characters
or less on the popular microblogging website

but actually tweeting the sound birds make.

the last character "niao" means bird or birds.

so this whole one can be translated as birds
can be heard tweeting everywhere.

now the third one reads: Ye lai feng yu sheng.

the first character is ye which means night and
the second character is "lai" which means come,

so together they mean night comes.

then we have "feng" meaning wind,
and "yu" meaning rain.

the last character is sheng meaning sound.

so this line translates as the night comes bring
the sound of wind and rain.

because the grammar of classical chinese is very flexible,

the word like and mean to come or to bring,

so this line can pertain to the night coming for
the night bringing the sound of wind and rain.

so we have included both in the translation.

now the final line reads: hua luo zhi duo shao.

hua means flower and luo means to fall.

luo was a common way to say drop or
fall in the classical Chinese.

now modern manner in the character luo
is used less to describe drop of fall

but it's still used in Cantonese which is more
closely related to Tang dynasty chinese

than modern Mandarin is.

now the next three characters are zhi
which means to know.

you may regconize it as the first character
from the modern Chinese word zhi dao,

which means to know.

in classical Chinese that often use one character
where modern Chinese would use two.

then the next two characters duo shao together
mean how many, same as in modern Chinese.

so this line in its entirety means
do you know how many flowers fell.

flowers in this life most likely first blossoms on trees

since the line suggest that they fell meaning
they would have had to have started higher up

let's now read the poem
together repeat after me

thanks for watching everyone and we'll
bring you some more classical poetry next week

still read and speak Chinese