New Britain herald., 1922-09-18
CAN LEARN CHINESE
 WITHIN SIX MONTHS
Instructor Says American Can Acquire 1000 Words in that Time

The first step for one who wants to
 seize commercial opportunities in
 China Is to learn the Chinese len-
 guage-the elements of the spoken
 language at least, according to Frank. | lin c. H. Lee, American instructor of
 Mandarin Chinese in Oakland Tech
 nical High school. who has received
 many inquiries concerning the Chinese
 language. Often, he says, the ques-
 ton is asked. What is the length
 of time required to learn the lan-
 guage ?"
 "The language is not so hard for Americans to learn as many imagine | it to be-" Mir. Lee says in report for the Chinese Trade bureau Generally speaking, there are two languages in China. Weni, the written language in it's old form, an unspoken lam
 guage and the spoken language. It is
 the Wenli, or unspoken language, that
 foreigners find supremely difficult It is no easy thing even for the Chinese themselves. And it is probably safe to say that 1t is only the very bright foreign student who ever learns to use 1t. To master 1t would mean lifetime study of Chinese literature to the exclusion of everything else. The Wenli has an enormous vocabulary. An ordinary old Chinesa literary man needs a vocabulary of at least 5000 words. To acquire it he must spend | at least eight years in close study. It l has great brevity and the style is varied and complex
 'The spoken language, the one that the business man will need, ia simple and easy in comparison. Its is very small, the ordinary working man does not employ more than a few hundred words. Mission aries in China know that their chill dren, brought up under the care of Chinese nurses pick up Chinese words much easier and faster than they learn English; and long before they can much more than babbe in their parents tongue, they talk quite flu ently the Chinese of their nurses and playmates.
 Sir Walter Hillier, professor of the Chinese language at Kings college, London, says that student devoting an hour or so a day to his book should master a thousand words in six months.
 AS for reading Chinese, neither is that so difficult. And it has been i'm facilitated by the new liter ary revolution in China which was set in motion by the professors and students four years ago in the Picking government university Through the agency of the newspapers and en- thusiastic students, the movement has been making great gains and is com. ing more and more into favor. Many books and magazines have adopted the new style of written language, which uses colloquial Chinese in writ ing. The next movement proposes to eliminate Wenli and adopt Kuan-hua, the popular spoken language, for writing.
 "A remarkable achievement in con- nectlon with the newly adopted writ ten style was the invention ten years ago of Chinese alphabet, copy of which may be obtained from the Oak land Technical school. In the old Chinese language there is no alpha bet, It has 10000 characters To write these characters requires from one to 60 distinct strokes of the pen
 The new system has 39 letters di- vided into sound roots or initials, neutral roots or interchangeable and or finals. The alphabet is not divided into consonants and vowes. These letters are used to spell the sounds of the Chinese char acters, which are always monosylla- bic; that is, each word has only one sound. There are 420 sounds in the language. Most of them can be rep resented by a combination of an in- itial and final letter. A very few require the addition of an inter- changeable. Each word has from one to three letters, except hyphenated words. Each letter has it's absolute sound, with no variation whatsoever. Therefore one cannot make any mis- take in pronunciation. This system is absolutely necessary because the l Chinese characters are ideographs. | There is no way for the school chill dren 10 tell how to pronounce writ ten Chinese except by learning yer baly the character from the teacher.