I'm so surprised that you will study this difficult kind of Chinese. In my opinion,when you start to learn classical Chinese,you should have some Chinese bases,and you should have ready for remembering many meanings of words and learning the grammar of using some important words. The former means that there are many different meanings which is maybe unexpected of even one word and you have to spend much time to remember and read . And the latter means that if you can remember and recognize the rules to use prep. v. adj. adv. and so on,you will get a great progress.And the rules are really regular but may be not the same part of speech you usually know in life.So you have to remember the examples and learn the rules that you can know the meaning when it appears in other sentences. As is mentioned above,they are the most important things in learning classical Chinese I think. Although,some people think it will be a little boring .So ,I recommend that when you are remembering such two things you can also find some Tang poems and Chinese Song Poems to read which may help you find the feeling to learn classical Chinese and find something interesting. Of course,it's more important to find and translate some sentences of articles written in the classical Chinese. And after that you should find the correct translation to know the difference between it and yours .Then you can learn how to translate such kind of sentences you meet next time .When you read some articles written in classical Chinese you can just treat it as a story about the culture of ancient china which will be more interesting for your learning. I don't know if what I said can help you ,but I hope you can have pleasure in your classical Chinese learning.

从简单的看起。可以先看《三国演义》《水浒》，这些都是古白话小说，和现代汉语相近，很易懂，看完并对古文有大概印象后，可以看《红楼梦》《儒林外史》等文字更偏文言文的小说。中国的古典小说很精彩，看起来应该会很轻松，并且只有看《三国演义》《红楼梦》，才真正称得上是学中文。把书中一些特殊句式和一些古文中与现代汉语意义不同甚至相反的字（比如“去”字）意思记下来，如果遇见虚词，像“也”“而”之类的，实在不理解就不要去纠缠，读完这几本书就差不多可以看正式的文言文了。先找一些较短的文章看，比如《马说》《奕秋》之类，然后再看篇幅较长的。篇幅长的文章中，推荐看《史记》中的列传，唐宋文章和三国南北朝时期的文章。不过这三类文章各有难点。《史记》距今两千多年，有些字已不用，涉及的专有名词较多，但总体很好懂。唐宋文章大多为议论文，文章内容与写作背景有很大关系，隐藏的意义有些晦涩，并且虚词有点多，不过字面意思好懂。三国南北朝时期的文章很好懂也很有趣，但省略特别多，语言特别简洁，不推荐初学时使用，不过可以用来练语感。文言文中的一些特殊体裁，主要是“赋”和“骈文”，不建议用来学习，因为里面涉及很多对文字的处理以达到体裁要求，从而语法零乱，学习后会晕的，不过可以用来背诵，这种文体的文字是很优美的。至于唐诗宋词，很多都涉及虚实相生，以背诵为主，背熟后，也就自然能鉴赏了。最后，告诉你一个文言文小技巧：文言文中几乎全部为单字词，例如“妻子”在文言文中就是两个词，指现在的妻子和儿子。

Classical Chinese is very difficult even to Chinese people. There're many special syntactical structures. And sometimes the meaning and pronunciation of the words are totally different from the present chinese language. If you want to study it, find a simple tutorial which provides detailed explanations for syntactical structures,word meanings and pronunciations and also provides translations sentence by sentence. By the way learning history well is helpful to study classical Chinese. This website gives some tips to study classical Chinese. http://www.xuexifangfa.com/yuwen/wenyanwen/

Aww...I admire your confidence and courage,Beth,really,I do....Cuz I don't understand ancient Chinese very well even though I'm from China.When I was a senior high school student,the thing that could give me "headache"is Classical Chinese,I hate memorizing the different meanings of those Chinese characters,but I do admire people who have a good command of it.So I'm sorry that I cannot give ya a hand,but I think maybe you can start reading some simple articles,and I've found some short and simple articles online,hope these can help ya..:Dhttp://zhidao.baidu.com/question/21253691.html

　　Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese. Classical Chinese was once used for almost all formal correspondence before and during the beginning of the 20th century, not only in China but also, during various different periods, in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam。(http://edu.sina.com.cn/en/2010-07-01/143756412.shtml) Please visit the sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese http://www.hudong.com/wiki/%E6%96%87%E8%A8%80%E6%96%87 http://www.chinadetail.com/Culture/LanguagesLiteraryChinese.php http://www.tsoidug.org/trans.php I hope it will be also useful for you.