Author : Omar L. Kilborn
Publisher : Forgotten Books
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2015-06-24
Category : Foreign Language Study
ISBN : 1330352734
Chinese Lessons for First Year Students in West China by Omar L. Kilborn Pdf
Excerpt from Chinese Lessons for First Year Students in West China The first business of the missionary on arrival in China is to "get the language". And most missions now allow the first two years for language study. We might better avoid that word "allow"; saying rather that a minimum of two years is required by most missions for language study, during which period no other responsibility is put upon the new worker. I believe that we shall soon come to the point when no new worker will be given more than partial responsibility during his third and perhaps his fourth years, so that he may have large freedom for perfecting himself in the language, and in methods and principles of work. In the acquisition of Chinese, the ability to speak and to hear comes first in importance; much farther down in the scale comes reading; and much lower still, the ability to write Chinese characters. All four processes should be carried on together, but far the most emphasis placed on the first two, and the least emphasis on the last, at any rate in the first year. It is clear that a word or a sentence which we are able to speak and to hear, will be easily picked up in the character. To reverse the process is like the study of the dead languages. The principle that I have had in mind in the preparation of these sentences is the supreme importance of the spoken language, as compared with the characters. I believe that we should first study words and sentences, not characters, and not even idioms. This is surely the natural order; for man learned to speak long ages before he ever thought of writing. Neither did he learn idioms first; he began to speak, and when he had learned to write his speech, he began to discover or to make order and unity, and to designate some of his peculiarities of speech as idioms. But what words and sentences shall we study? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
