Easy Lessons In Chinese And Samuel Wells Williams' Chinese Teaching

Samuel Wells Williams(1812~1884) was one of the early American protestant missionaries, he arrived in China in 1833 and returned to America in 1876. In the 43 years, his main job was editing and printing Chinese Repository in the first 20 years, and from 1856, he had been the interpreter and secretary of American Legation in China and had 9 times acted as the agent of American Commissioner-in-charge in China. After returning to his homeland in 1876, he became the first professor of Chinese Language and Literature in Yale University, which is the first professional Sinologue in the United Stated. During his stay in China, he was both a missionary and a diplomat, as well as a Sinologue, his representative works are The Middle Kingdom, A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language, Dictionary of the Canton Dialect, Ying Hwa Yun-fu Lih-Kiai, Easy Lessons in Chinese and A Chinese Commercial Guide, and so on. Easy Lessons in Chinese is his first Chinese textbook which was written for the beginners. This book gave much help to the foreigners who wanted to learn Chinese, especially Canton Dialect at that time.This essay mainly falls into four parts:The first part introduces the compiling background and principles of Easy Lessons in Chinese. The textbook was published in 1842, the main reason of compiling the textbook was to provide a convenient book for the people who just arrived at China. Then has a discussion on if S.W.Williams compiled the textbook according to the targeted and useful principles.The second part summarizes the teaching contents and methods of the radicals and primitives, pronunciation and writing, classifiers, reading and translating. The main content of radicals and primitives teaching is about the introduction on 214 radicals of the Imperial Dictionary of Kanghi, primitives, the rules of form characters. In my opinion, this is the core part of Easy Lessons in Chinese. S.W.Willams didn't pay much on the pronunciation and writing teaching, so this paper does the same way as he did; classifiers'teaching is the feature of this textbook, S.W.Williams provided 70 classifiers in total to the learners; reading and translating teaching occupied nearly half of the textbook, this paper summarizes then analyzes this part.By linking up with the introduction of each chapter, the third part analyzes the major teaching methods——Translation Method and Exemplification Method.The last part concentrates on the contribution to the history of Chinese teaching in the world, then talks about the shortcomings of Easy Lessons in Chinese.Samuel Wells Williams started to compile the Chinese textbooks from Easy lessons in Chinese, this book reflects his basic Chinese teaching concepts. The research on this book has some significance not only to the study on S. W. Williams but also to the history of early American Sinology.