A Study On The Chinese Handbook Of Chinese Sinologist

The book A handbook of the Chinese Language (1863) was an representativework of James Summers, an English sinologist in the middle19th century. It was alsoused as a textbook in King’s College London during the period of James Summers asthe Chinese professor. This thesis tries to make a textual research on its Chinesepronunciation, characters, vocabulary and grammar teaching, as well as to knowmore about teaching Chinese as a second language in United Kingdom in the middleand later19th century. This thesis is mainly devided into6chapters.The first chapter intends for explaining the reasons why choosing this topic andgiving a brief introduction of the present studies on James Summers. Besides, thetheories and methods adopted as well as the sources of the materials are alsoincluded.The second chapter briefly introduces the life of Summers, as well as thebackground of writing A Handbook of the Chinse Language. It also presents andanalyses the main content of the book and the teaching thoughts of Summers.The third chapter observes the phonetic mark methods of A Handbook of theChinese Language. And it analyses whether his phonetic system conforms to the realChinese pronunciation from the aspects of vowels, consonants and tones as well ascomparing with another book A Grammar of the Chinese Colloquial Language byJoseph Edkins. Also, this chapter talks about the Chinese characters and radicals, andthe features in teaching Chinese characters.The forth chapter studies the teaching of Chinese vocabulary and is divided intotwo parts. The first part analyses Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives and how to teach themaccording to the book. The second part is about “appositives(量词)” and pronouns.The fifth chapter makes an observation on the functions and features ofdifferent kinds of “particles”, including the comments of teaching different Chinesesentence categories by using “particles”. Simultaneously, the analysis of phrasesteaching, including Subject-predicate phrases, Verb-object phrases, The verb-complement phrases, phrases with “de(的)”，was presented here.The sixth chapter makes a conculsion about the characteristics of the book,discusses about its disadvantages and shows the value of A Handbook of the ChineseLanguage.