The Research Of Introductory Mandarin Lessons Or Hua Yü Hsin CHieh

Introductory Mandarin Lessons is a textbook on basic oral Chinese, which is collaborated by a First Lieutenant in U.S.Marines whose name is James. Marshall. Mchugh and his Chinese teacher Chou k’ou-yun in 1931. This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter mainly makes an introduction of the purpose and significance of this research, introduces the theoretical background and researches methods and the sources of documents for this thesis. At the same time, we’d made a preliminary research on the authors and the teaching material arrangement briefly.The second chapter mainly analyses the pronunciation pedagogy. Firstly, it described the tone sandhi theory of reduplicated adjectives, which is relatively scientific at that time. Meanwhile, it points out that the specialities and absence of modification in the speech. Secondly, by comparing with the Wade-Giles Romanization, it indicates the delicate shades and improvement of initials and finals. Finally, it mainly describes the discrimination of finals, which is important and error-prone in learning Chinese, thus showing its practicability and pertinence.The third chapter analyses the view of teaching that Zi is the basic structural unit of Chinese by the construction of vocabulary. Because of the the number and arrange of vocabulary, we can see the teaching characteristics of this book is its simplicity and progressive. We can also find its usefulness of Lexical Choice and the vocabularies are networked.The fourth chapter ia aimed to reveal the the teaching methods of grammar in this textbook from the perspective of three parts of speech, phrase and sentence. In this chapter, the choreography of classifiers is reasonable and numerals show its unique teaching method with chart. Besides, we analyse the teaching order and arrangement of concurrent phrase and complement phrase, make comments on the "Ba" sentence and interrogative sentence, and point out that the excessive dilution of grammar teaching will bring some negative impacts on students.The fifth chapter makes a comparative study from two aspects in three books which are all cooperated with embassy officers in the same period(Introductory Mandarin Lessons, Practical Chinese-including a topical dictionary of 5000 everyday terms, and Current Chinese). We will explore and distinguish the intrinsic link between the three textbooks. Initially, we can find that Introductory Mandarin Lessons is the product of the transition period of the two other books. It improves inherites the former, although not perfect, but provides a certain degree of reference for the latter.The sixth chapter is the basic evaluation. Introductory Mandarin Lessons, as a primary Chinese spoken textbook, it can show its characteristics of the "new" and "fast" in the pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and other aspects. We believe its historical value and also pointed out the shortcomings.