The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-06-12
TEACHING CHINESE TONGUE.
Schools That Surprise Visitors and Re
 mind Them of Ilunatic Asylums.

l oCuOOlS IudI SufpflSe V NlSllOrS ana IOs
 mind Them of Lunatic Asylums.
 Were one to work eight hours day
 at learning any ordinary language tht
 end of six months would show remark
 able progress. Not so, however, witt
 Chinese. Half a year is but the begin
 ming. To enter the Chinese maritime
 service halfla years schooling in the
 language is necessary, This is ob-
 talned at Nankin or Pekin, writes a
 correspondent of. the Philadelphia
 Press.
 The whole idea of the Chinese Ian
 guage is so diametrically opposed to
 anything known In America or Europe that 1t takes long while for the ordi-
 nary Caucasian to get a general idea of
 how to goato work.
 The lot of the pupil Is no sinecure.
 He starts with Wades "Tzu Erie Chl,'' a book written by a British ex-mlnlster,
 and works out the Chinese characters
 from the English text that accompa-
 nies them. He must not ony master
 the intricacies of writing all the char acters, but must figure out the con- struction of the sentences as we'll. | Therein lies the rule
 l The poor chap has to take everything | for granted. He learns his characters and can write them, and if he is lucky and has a good ear, he can pronounce ! them. But when it comes to stringing them together so that they will make sense, he is lost.
 He must learn not only words and l,,I, l,,r+ o,,f and by long usage and continual prac- tice acquire the instinct for conversa- ton.
 There is no other way The Chinese themselves have to do the same thing. From the time they begin to read, until trey have climbed as high on the litera- ry ladder as their intellects or purses will permit, they read, and dommit to memory the r1assics. Their fathers did it before them; their sons will do it in generations to come, and in this way, instead of formulating rules of syntax, they have committed forms to memory. Those forms are correct and no others may be used, not that one is more logi- cal than the other, but because the one has been learned by rote and the other has not
 The white man must run the same course, but he is handicapped at the outset by ideas of grammar and a hun dred other things which he must abso- lutely put aside as he plugs" away on the new line.
 He is first put to work on the radicals, a group of two hundred and fourteen odd characters, which, in dicerent per- mutations and combinations, form the basis of the other twenty-five thousand characters that make up the language. He has first to commit these radicals to memory; then he must practise the "aones" This means spending an hour or two a day going over a series of ris- ing and falling, stretched-out and chopped off monosyllables, which the teacher draws out and the pupil wildly tries to initiate. There are four tones for each sound; each tone has differ ent sometimes half q dozen different characters, and each character means two or three different things depending on the way 1t Is used in the sentence. Any one dropping in at the Sustoms college when all the doors had been thrown open in the heat of the day, would think himself In a lunatic asy lum so great is the hubbub and the bawIing of strange, weird sounds.