Classical Chinese Particle Helper (文言虚词)

How common particles are in the Analects and Mencius

Particles (虚词 xūcí) are the classical Chinese characters whose main job is grammatical, such as 之, 乎, 者 and 也; the content words (实词) are the nouns, verbs and adjectives. Where the line falls depends on whose grammar you use: mainland school grammar counts adverbs as 虚词, and Taiwan's Ministry of Education dictionary files the "of" sense of 之 as a preposition.

The 23 here are about a quarter of the text

We counted the Wikisource texts of the Analects (15,929 Chinese characters) and Mencius (35,383). The 23 characters in this tool make up 22.9% of the Analects and 25.6% of Mencius. That count includes their uses as content words (之 meaning "to go", for instance), so it is an upper bound. Widen the set to 57 characters by adding negatives, adverbs and demonstratives and the share is 31.6–34.0%. For comparison, the same 23 are 5.3% of Lu Xun's The True Story of Ah Q (1921).

One character, several jobs

Taiwan's Revised Mandarin Chinese Dictionary files 之 under six parts of speech, and 以 under six as well. The tool lists only the commonest uses of each, each with a line from a classical text. The usual traps are a character changing jobs: 乎 ends a question, but mid-sentence it is often a preposition equal to 于 (Han Yu's "On Teachers": 生乎吾前, "born before me"); and in 夫子之言性与天道, 与 is yǔ "and", not "take part in".

「之乎者也，助得甚事！」 ("Zhi, hu, zhe, ye: what do they help with?")
The Song founder's reply when he asked why a gate was named 明德之门 and his minister Zhao Pu said 之 was "a helping word". Recorded in Shao Bowen's Shaoshi wenjian lu, juan 1 (Wikisource); the Taiwan MOE dictionary, citing Xiangshan yelu, gives the gate as 朱雀之门.

Where "the 18 particles" come from

The 2019 Gaokao Chinese exam outline, issued by the National Education Examinations Authority of China's Ministry of Education, asks candidates to understand "common classical particles" and lists 18: 而 何 乎 乃 其 且 若 所 为 焉 也 以 因 于 与 则 者 之. It calls them common, not required. According to the Guangdong education examinations authority, no outline has been issued since 2020 and candidates may keep using the 2019 edition. Nor is it a frequency list: 矣 occurs 181 times in the Analects and 夫 105 times, and neither is on it, while 乃 occurs 3 times and 因 5. This tool adds 矣, 哉, 夫, 岂 and 尔 to the 18.

Classical texts in the Hong Kong and Taiwan curricula

Hong Kong's Education Bureau set 12 classical texts for senior secondary Chinese in June 2015, examined from the 2018 HKDSE. They include three Analects selections, Mencius's "Fish is what I want" (鱼我所欲也), the biography of Lian Po and Lin Xiangru, and Han Yu's "On Teachers". Taiwan's 12-year curriculum guidelines for Chinese (January 2018) set classical Chinese at 35–45% of senior-high lessons averaged over three years (not counting the Chinese Cultural Basic Materials course), and its 15 recommended classical texts include "Zhu Zhiwu Turns Back the Qin Army", "The Feast at Hongmen", "The Peach Blossom Spring" and "On Teachers", all quoted in this tool.