Or making many books to tench Chinese to foreign students there seems to be virtually no eud. When we compare the abundance of Manuals, Dialogues, Vocabalaries, sionaries and so forth now at the disposition of those who wish to dip into the mysteries of the Chinese language, with the entire absence of such aids twenty or one must admit that the facilities ud great, yet remains to be done; at the same time so much has been done that one is tempted that the enthusiasm of labourers especial field could_be turned, for once in a way, in another direction: While bookstores teem with manual for helping foreigners to learn Chines: there is scarcely a single work for helping Chinese to learn English. Natives who spank English fluently have in nearly every instance learned to do so either abroad, or in some of the foreign schools established in China Hongkong. The system pursue: in these institutions is no doubt efficient enough, but still there are numbers of Chinese who are anxious to learn a foreign tongue and are yet absolutely a able, from various causes, to outer themselves as students in a regular school. These men constitute a class which is yearly increasing in both numbers and importance. Even houseboys and coolies may not aufrequently be caught in the act of poring over some tasty-louking little book of English and Chinese vocabularies, and emitting in an undertone a succession of peculiar sounds confidently supposed to represent oer. tain definite English words. Que of these laudable attempts at representing our barbarous polysyllables by means of the monosyllabic characters of China lies now before us. Ench English word has appended to it its signification in, Chinese, and what purporta to be pronaneiation. Some, of course, sent little or no difficulty to the tranaiterater. Such words us aoa," " tea, "eye," "low," " too," one" and "wa are each ensily represented by avy: one of a dozen or more Chines words the pronunciation of which almost exactly similar; indeed there a nambers similarly amenable. Butit is difficult to recognise in such strange combinations as en-tow-sz-tan-te, mén~ words "understand," idea of English pronunciation is to learn the alphabet, and to educate his enr by listening to the spoken Ian. mind is absolutely vague on this point it is no wonder that his pronunciation is so defective. Another attempt to convey some idea of English to Chines students lies before us in the shape of a Method ' on the Ollendorff principle, issued from the Catholic Mission Press at Siccawei. This, no don! fal book enough, "Where is your cat?—It la at the bottom of the well." "Who will make a choice of these merchant will make parasol is this the queen ao liver-complaint P—-Yes, she has a liver-complaint." " Who has a stiff neck?—My old brother haa a stiff neck." Nothing could be be! calculated to arouse the enthusiasm of a Chinese schoolboy than the fal sentences, But the book is open to very great improvement, The great, prime difficalty in teaching English ta Chinese la to make him clearly understand the differents parts of speal and the different cases of a noun. No one is more conscious of this defect i in the Chinese mind than a man who has read classical works with a a called native teacher. He comes, say, to 'a sentence in which it is difficult at first eight to recognise either nomi tive or verb, The former, per understood the latter seems clearly enough to be an adjective. The fondlier must be made to understand that 4 sentence in every language in the world must have a subject and " predicate, otherwise it is not a sentence; and une less the Chinese literate knows what a subject and a predionte are, and recog nisses them by some name, it is h "peles to got him to pat his finger on side down, to begin with, to the the sentence, it is frequently i it to make him go on to give:
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.