Walter Hillier

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fluency in speaking, as has been shown, is attainable by most people who will devote the necessary labour to its acquisition, and translation of written Chinese into a foreign language is not beyond the capacity of any diligent student, but it may safely be asserted that there is no living European who can reverse the process and turn out unaided an original Chinese composition of sufficient elegance to command the respect of a Chinese scholar. ”

“ A foreign child brought up under the charge of a Chinese nurse will pick up Chinese words with much greater facility than it will imbibe English, and will be talking fluently in the vernacular long before it can do more than babble in the language of its parents, and yet a foreign adult may spend a lifetime in the country and not know ten words of Chinese. ”

“ In almost all Chinese composition, again, measured periods, not unlike blank verse, abound, and are esteemed by the scholar as a capital beauty of the language. Ideas, it may be said, often form the secondary object of consideration, the mode in which they are expressed claiming first attention. Thought also is stereotyped, and all the ideas which the Chinese wish to cherish or indicate are contained, as stated above, in those records which have come down to them from the sages of antiquity. ”

“ A thorough working acquaintance with the vocabulary of a coolie in all its varied combinations would be sufficient for most people, as the coolie, to all intents and purposes, speaks the language which his master speaks, and if his stock of Chinese words could be handled in the way that he handles them the person who possessed this faculty would have little left to desire. ”

“ The modern style of Chinese composition that is daily gaining ground, partly in consequence of the revised system of education, which is placing classics and poetry somewhat in the back- ground, and also through the influence of the newspapers, which are now read by millions of people, is bringing a much simpler form of composition into vogue which can be read with comparative ease. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Far from this being the case, its construction is fairly simple, much more so than that of a scientific language, German for instance, and in the matter of the expression of simple wants there is nothing difficult whatever. Yet it is not too much to say that not ten per cent, of Europeans who have devoted several years to the study of the language speak really well; that it requires from five to ten years constant practice to speak fluently, and that there is probably hardly a living instance of a European speaking Chinese so well as to be undistinguishable from a native. ”

“ As a final demonstration of the distinction that is drawn between the written and the spoken languages, it may be stated that the Chinese do not read books of a high-class character aloud to an audience. ”

“ 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 difficulty in the comprehension and use of the written language for anything beyond the simplest purposes lies in the fact that it abounds in metaphor and allusion. ”

“ There is probably no short cut to a knowledge of any language, and certainly none to Chinese. If a student will not take the small amount of trouble necessary to master eight hundred to a thousand symbols he had better leave Chinese alone
The question of pronunciation must be faced at the outset. If the learner goes far wrong in his initial appreciation of the value of Chinese sounds he will find it difficult to correct his mistakes later on. ”

“ English into Chinese, he will find that at the end of twelve months he has made lamentably little progress. It may safely be said that any young Englishman of average intelligence and education who lived in France or in Germany for two years and devoted the whole of his time to the study of either language, would become a fluent speaker and writer at the end of that period. The Chinese Consular Service of Great Britain is officered by men who pass a severe competitive examination before admission, and must consequently be above the average standard of education and ability. ”

“ THE CHINESE LANGUAGE 19 On the other hand, any one who will take the trouble can acquire a sufficient vocabulary at the end of a few months to make his ordinary wants known, or to travel anywhere without the aid of an interpreter. If he wishes to get beyond this elementary stage he must make up his mind for some very up-hill work. In later chapters an attempt is made to assist the student in acquiring such a knowledge of the spoken language as will enable him to carry qn an ordinary conversation. ”

“ If we look up the radical J|L in 鱔魚 THE CHINESE LANGUAGE the list of radicals at the beginning or end ol the dictionary, as the case may be, where it will be placed in the numerical order of the strokes of which it is composed, we shall be able to trace it to its place in the body of the volume, and there we shall find the character we are in search of placed in the list of characters of five strokes ranged under that radical. ”

“ If he wishes to express a thought out of the common, or a complex idea, he dives into his store of recollection and quotes a word or two from the sayings of some ancient sage which are suggestive rather than perspicuous. ”

“ It can keep pace with modern requirements, for when 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. ”

“ There are now many Chinese characters the radical of which is placed at the top, below, or at one or other side, and in a few instances its position i& determined by the fancy of the writer. Besides being an indicator of the meaning, the radical has a further, and most important, value. By its aid it is possible to find any character in a dictionary of the Chinese language, whether purely native, or prepared for the use of the foreign student. Let us take the character Ifjj for an ex- ample, the radical of which is ML, a nose. Now count the number of strokes in the phonetic. ”

“ It is, necessarily, not perfect, but it is probably as good as any that can be made, and in spite of much antagonism it has held its own and has outlived various systems which other scholars have endeavoured to force upon the public. All English- speaking people accept it, and though other nationalities spell many Chinese sounds in their own way, they have to fall back on the Wade system when writing for universal information. ”

“ It has been suggested in the previous section that the vocabulary of the ordinary Chinese working man does not exceed a few hundred words, and it is obvious that any one who could secure a knowledge of these words would be on the high road to an understanding of the language spoken by the Chinese coolie. ”

“ In poetry, and generally in prose composition, only words of a certain tone can occupy fixed places in a clause or line of a certain length, and any deviation from rule will set the line out of tune, though a regard for these rules is not necessary for purposes of clearness ”

“ Modern literature can hardly be said to exist, and novels, as we understand them, are almost all placed under the ban of Imperial prohibition. They are to be found in limited numbers, it is true, but there are no modern society novels. ”

“ In its present form it is read and understood, not only throughout the whole dominions of an Empire embracing—to take the popular estimate—three hundred and sixty millions of human beings, but it is also extensively used in adjacent kingdoms. In Korea, the Chinese Classics are studied in all the schools and exert no inconsiderable influence on the character of the nation, while Chinese is the common vehicle of official correspondence ”

“ Of this latter form few, if any, genuine examples exist, though tradition has it that a copy of a portion of the Chinese Classics written in the "tadpole" script was discovered about the year 150 B.C. hidden away in the walls of the house originally occupied by Confucius, where it had been placed by some of his descendants to escape the burning of all written records by the Emperor Shih Huang Ti in B.C. 213. The first of the above mentioned six styles is known as the Chuan Shu, commonly called the "Seal character" by Europeans. ”

“ Throughout the region of the Yangtsze Valley, as it has now come to be called, and from thence northwards, we " come into the range of the great dialect, popularly known as ' Mandarin,' which sweeps round behind the narrow strip of coast occupied by the various dialects above mentioned, and dominates a hinterland constituting about four-fifths of China proper." ”

“ The experiment has been tried, but it has never been a success, owing, amongst other causes, to the complications presented by the four intonations referred to in the previous chapter, while it is most unsatisfactory to find one's horizon limited by ignorance of the symbols used by the people themselves. ”