Page:The Chinese language and how to learn it.djvu/29

 a new word or term has to be employed it is perfectly easy to invent a symbol to indicate it, while there is not a single thought, phrase or idea that is not capable of expression in Chinese."

All this is, theoretically, true enough, but what the Chinese enthusiast loses sight of is the immense amount of study required to obtain a working knowledge of even the small proportion of the forty odd thousand characters that are required for practical purposes, while nothing but constant practice will enable any one to write these characters correctly. Chinese caligraphy is an art in which few, if any, Europeans have ever become proficient. It is possible to acquire facility in writing, but elegance of style can only be arrived at by those who have commenced to learn in childhood and have practised daily throughout the years of their educational life. There is another point overlooked by the Chinese enthusiast which is at the root of the supreme difficulty attending anything approaching to proficiency in the written language. It is not impossible to obtain a working knowledge of three, four, or five thousand symbols, which is all that a man of average education need have at his command a knowledge of 2,000 characters would be sufficient to take one through the whole Chinese Penal Code, for instance and if each character expressed only one word or idea, and was always limited to that one word, the difficulty would be comparatively small. But this is not the case. Almost every character, by being placed in a different position in a sentence, or used in a different combination, assumes, in some instances a different shade of meaning, and in others expresses an entirely new idea. The absence of grammar, which the language is popularly supposed to enjoy, does not present such a difficulty to the student as might be supposed. Indeed, it may be said to be somewhat of a luxury to find oneself untrammelled by the forms and accidents of grammatical rule. Number, case, mood, tense, &c., can be indicated by particles, while the value of the word which does duty impartially for noun, preposition, or verb can generally be discovered by a study of the context. The real