Page:Lange-Noss - A text-book of colloquial Japanese.djvu/8

 If I had been permitted to remain in Japan I might have undertaken a complete reconstruction of the work ; but that is out of the question for the present. A call for a second edition having come unexpectedly soon, I have had time only for a superficial revision, with constant reference to the second German edition, which appeared at Berlin in the early part of this year. The new Lehrbuch contains eight hundred pages, of which the last two hundred are devoted to an entirely new German-Japanese vocabulary. Since students now have access to a very satisfactory English-Japanese dictionary it does not seem necessary to include such a feature in the English edition. The improvements in the body of the new German edition were largely anticipated by the former English edition, in the preparation of which, as has been stated, Dr. Lange generously co-operated with me. Accordingly, in the main, the arrangement and the paging remain as before. The selections at the end have been somewhat increased.

The aim of the book is pedagogical rather than scientific ; hence the combination of system and no-system and the numerous repetitions. The pedagogical principle has been applied, for example, in the study of words. When it seems likely to aid the memory of the student to indicate the origin of a word, this is clone ; but when the etymology is disputed or apt to be confusing, nothing is said about it and the student must learn the word as a whole. The repetitions in most cases are not accidental but designed. For the student must pass through three stages to become master of an idiom-First, he needs to be thoroughly convinced that there is such an idiom ; secondly, he must learn how to use it, and, thirdly, after he has entirely forgotten its existence he needs to be reminded that he cannot get along very well without it.

A truly scientific grammar of the colloquial is yet to be written. But in one respect this work may claim to be scientific : it has been the constant aim of Dr. Lange, and of myself, to set forth the language as it is actually spoken by the Japanese themselves, not as we would speak it. The sentences have all been taken from the mouths of Japanese and repeatedly reviewed and criticized by competent Japanese. The sentences to be translated from English into Japanese were first written out in Japanese and then translated into English with a view to retranslation.