Book Description

Excerpt from Elementary Lessons in Chinese The student will see from what has been said already the great importance of mastering these radicals. He should aim at a thorough familiarity firstly with the form Of the radical, secondly with the unmoor of strokes that compose it, thirdly with its numerical place in the following list. Of course each of these Chinese radicals has a sound Of its own, but I have not attempted here to reproduce that sound in English letters, for I have found by experience that it is far easier to provide a sound to which a beginner studying without a teacher will attach a wrong pronunciation that he will have afterwards to try and forget, than to provide a sound which will give him even an approximately correct notion Of what the pronunciation should be. Moreover, any sound that can be given in English letters will at best only represent the sounds as pronounced in certain parts of China; an altogether different pronunciation may be given to the same character in the particular district to which the student is going. At first nothing better can be done than to call each Chinese character by the English sound which is attached to it in this book, and which in every case represents its general meaning. In giving now a list Of the radicals, it will be well to Offer a few suggestions as to the best way of learning them. They are given here in their regular order as they will be found in any dictionary, but with a view to lightening the labour of learning them, an asterisk has been attached to those which are in most frequent use. While I should advise the student not to rest satisfied till he is thoroughly familiar with all the radicals, and can not only recognize them when he meets with them, but can also write them from memory, I should also advise him at the outset to pay special attention to the form, and number in the series, of those radicals which are marked with an asterisk. By far the larger number Of Chinese characters will be found under one or other of these: at the same time, if a student is not thoroughly familiar with the form even Of radicals that are. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.