Page:The Chinese language and how to learn it.djvu/52

34 the student can begin to play with them, and to make sentences of his own, but if he wishes to play a successful game he must try to forget all the laws of English grammatical construction, and endeavour to learn how to arrange his sentences in the way that a Chinese would arrange them. If he can once get hold of this system and make it his own, half the difficulties of the language will vanish, and it is with the idea of illustrating the Chinese order of construction that, in the exercises which follow, the literal translation of the Chinese equivalent is placed opposite to each sentence. One is almost tempted to apologize for suggesting that the student should feel his way to Chinese through the channel of "pidgin" English&mdash;for that is what it practically amounts to&mdash;but, if the process is adhered to for a certain time, it will help the learner more than anything else to speak as the Chinese speak.

The acquisition of a vocabulary is, naturally, a mere question of memory, and the great difficulty to be contended with is, not the committal to memory of disjointed phrases, but the combination of these phrases in a properly constructed sentence. This is what the English paraphrase is designed to teach. It will no doubt be subjected to derision by the scientific teacher, but, none the less, the mere eccentricity of the paraphrased sentences will help to fix the order of the words, as well as individual phrases, on the mind of the beginner, and the very little grammar there is to learn will indicate itself in the process as he goes on. If he will persevere to the end of these exercises, spelling out each one for himself, writing it in the Chinese character, and not referring to the key until each sentence is complete, he will assuredly not regret the time he has spent on the labour. When he reaches the end of the examples he will have no difficulty in recognizing the characters he has made his own wherever he may meet them, and he will find, when he turns his attention to more ambitious text-books, that he will sail along with comparative ease. If the writing of the characters is considered too great a labour the English transliteration of these characters should at least be written down, but the best way to fix them on the memory is to write them constantly. When once a character has established a firm place in the memory it will remain there, with very occasional revision, for all time. It may reappear in unfamiliar combinations, the meaning of which will have to be discovered by