Foster Arnold. Elementary Lessons in Chinese

London: H. Frowde, 1887. — 32 p.The object of this little book is firstly to provide some
easy lessons in the Chinese language for beginners who
cannot obtain the help of a teacher, and secondly to give
some hints to students which they will find useful through-
out the whole of their student course.Missionaries and others leaving England for the first time, are often either unable to obtain any Chinese books at all to study on their voyage, or they get hold of books which though good in themselves are of no practical use to them: A student destined to live at Canton for example, buys a book of phrases that might be of great use to him if he was proceeding to Peking, but this is of no use whatever to one whose business it is to study Cantonese. Or he buys a grammar which will perhaps be very useful to him after two or three years, but is of no use to a beginner. The dialects known as the Mandarin, the Cantonese, the Amoy, and the Foochow dialects, not to mention other minor varieties, are so entirely different from one another, that no speaker of any one of these will be intelligible in a district where another is spoken. This being so, it would be well for beginners, unless they have some trustworthy person to guide them in the purchase of books suitable for them to use in acquiring the colloquial of the district in which they are to reside, to wait until they arrive in China before spending their money on such books.