Review Of Francisco Varo’s Grammar Of The Mandarin Language And Its Compiling Principles

Francisco Varo’s Grammar of the Mandarin Language was the first Chinese grammar book that had been officially published and on record the earliest surviving work of its kind. This book not only offers a great value for the studies of Sinology, phonology of Chinese language, linguistics as well as social-cultural studies, but also provides access for scholars to learn more about the history of teaching materials for teaching Chinese as a second language and about the methods adopted in compiling such teaching materials.This thesis aims to review the compiling methods Varo used while writing the book and to compare his methods with the compiling principles advocated by most scholars nowadays in order to draw inspiration from Varo and Grammar of the Mandarin Language and to improve our textbook compiling theories which later on may guide the compilation of future textbooks.