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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;The Eidolon, post: 5456236, member: 102103&quot;]Classical Chinese is quite a bit different from Modern Chinese, and needs to be studied separately.&nbsp; But coins tend to have short noun phrases, which don&#039;t change much.&nbsp; Chinese words don&#039;t really take inflections, which makes them well suited to a character-based system, and more resistant to change over time than many languages.&nbsp; The pronunciation does change over time, and varies widely with dialect from place to place.&nbsp; But characters tell you almost nothing about the pronunciation, only the meaning.&nbsp; So even if we don&#039;t pronounce them the same way as ancient Chinese people, we could in theory still read them.&nbsp; (Kind of like how in reading Shakespearean poetry, some stuff which rhymed for him doesn&#039;t rhyme for us anymore.&nbsp; We can still pronounce it, but it looks a bit strange to us.)</p><p><br /></p><p>I know Japanese better than Chinese, and one reason Japanese pronunciation of Chinese loan words sounds so different from modern Chinese is that they are based on a pronunciation from a long time ago (many words came over with the writing system around 500-700 AD).&nbsp; And the dominant dialect of Chinese at the time would have probably been from a city much further south than the Beijing dialect which is considered &quot;standard&quot; today.</p><p><br /></p><p>As for reading different scripts, it&#039;s kind of like reading cursive in English today.&nbsp; It&#039;s falling out of use somewhat with people using computers more and handwriting less, but it&#039;s still a thing an educated person would be expected to be able to do.&nbsp; I use a very &quot;block&quot; style of writing characters, because that&#039;s closest to the printed characters I learned from, so I imagine my writing looks rather childish.&nbsp; The seal script is genuinely quite obsolete, and I think most native speakers would have trouble reading it except for the simplest characters.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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