The punctuation seems extraneous to me. They all come either before or after keywords so they don't seem to be needed to parse the script. IIRC it's very similar to actual Classical Chinese, which relied on words like 曰、乃、也 to indicate when a clause or sentence starts or ends. IIRC typically the punctuation was added as a part of the excercise of reading.[0]

[0] https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh-hant/%E5%8F%A5%E8%AE%80

Imperial Chinese COBOL is very natural sounding concept. That's for sure civil service exam material right there.

not sure if serious but this sounds like trying to learn english via python syntax

I learned English words like while, for and next from qbasic, for real (it had good help in your local language)

Ok but that is three words, what about the rest? Leaning three words is somewhat far removed from leaning a language. (Btw: I can’t grok your final statement in the parenthesis — it doesn’t make sense in English, what were you trying to say?)

It made sense to me: qbasic had good localized help.

It made sense to me as well but I can see how I got there and how I shamed the meaning of the sentence without thinking

> I learned English words like while, for and next from qbasic, for real (it had good help in your local language)

I replaced the word your with the word my in my head without conscious effort. I don't know if it is correct but it is kind of what I expected as I skimmed through the sentence.

There was an article or something saying when we read we can read fast because we don't read every word but rather try to auto complete as we go.

Oh right I see, yes it does make sense you’re right. I was really struggling with that last night, cheers.

The rest will come in when reading technical docs for libraries, APIs and such.

It's more like learning American English spelling from the names of DOM methods and interfaces.

Or Shakespeare English or Latin. The Classical Chinese is hard for chinese even. They are crazy. And said it is like cobol. Bye.

> I think it may be a fun way to practice my 漢字.

Bear in mind that this is Classical Chinese, not modern Mandarin. For example, as you can see in the helpful gloss a couple levels up, 是 in Classical Chinese is the demonstrative "this". (Whereas in modern Mandarin, 是 is the copula "to be [equating two nouns]", and "this" is 这 or perhaps 本.)

I'm familiar with that sense of 是 (also as 昰) from seeing it in some obscure Japanese text, where it was used to signify これ, which was probably about right when writing was new to Japan. In Japanese, 是 is more commonly used in words that to me seem unrelated to either the old, very old, or modern Chinese use of the character.

It's amazing how durable some of this stuff is, especially if you look at it from the perspective of recipients of Middle and Classical Chinese culture (such as Japan).