I’ve been trying to figure out how this stuff makes any sense in the first place for years. The methodology on Wikipedia is helpful not but enough for me to figure out how to do it myself on a novel piece of text. The idea is that you have a novel piece of Classical Chinese text, you put in a whole bunch of annotations to swap the word order, and then read it as if it’s a piece of Classical Japanese text, and then translate that into Modern Japanese. That’s a lot of intermediate steps that are just wholly unnecessary. But let us entertain the idea for the moment, as though it’s actually a methodology that works instead of just recognizing that Literary Chinese is a whole ass language unto itself.

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