Research Of A Chinese Manual By Robert Kennaway Douglas

A Chinese Manual,Comprising A Condensed Grammar with Idiomatic Phrases And Dialogues is written by Robert Kennaway Douglas, who is a famous diplomat, the third professor teaching Chinese in King’s College and the first keeper of the British Museum’s new Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts in 19 th century. This dissertation studies Douglas’ s experiences and works, after that a presentation about the structure and the arrangement of A Chinese Manual will be made. Then the introduction about the pronunciation and the character of Chinese will be analyzed. At last the emphasis are put on researching lexical category and syntax in A Chinese Manual. This dissertation has five chapters.The first chapter is about the object and the significance of the topic. Then the introduction of the present studies referring to Douglas and the situation about Chinese teaching at that time in England, the theories and the methods adopted as well as the sources of the materials will be showed in this chapter.The life experiences and works of Douglas will be introduced in the second chapter. Further study is developed by showing the structure and the arrangement of A Chinese Manual. The analyzation of the introduction about the pronunciation and character of Chinese is essential to help understand the guidance of learning Chinese grammar.The third chapter will analyze the teaching of the vocabulary and lexical category. Firstly, the counting of vocabulary numbers, the emphasis of the vocabulary and the words that have several pronunciations and meanings will be given. It can be found that the book’s vocabulary is not large and the contents of the vocabulary begin to focus on understanding the basic words, gradually related to the topic of the dialogues. It’s obvious that lexical category is taught mainly by adding a prefix or suffix, lacking teaching prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, which are interspersed in the other parts of the teaching as a prefix.The fourth chapter analyzes the syntax of the book from three aspects of sentence patterns,sentence constructions and sentence types.Sentence patterns are analyzed from the two aspects of simple sentences and complex sentences.According to the special marks of the sentences,the emphasis of sentence constructions is put on the analysis of the“you”sentence(“有”字句),“shi”sentence(“是”字句),“ba”sentence(“把”字句),“bei”sentence(“被”字句).Finally,according to the tone of the sentence,the interrogative sentence and the imperative sentence in sentence types are selected to be analyzed.The fifth chapter is the basic evaluation of the advantages, disadvantages and values of A Chinese Manual. The advantage of this book is that the style is clear, detailed and appropriate; the classification is meticulous and the difference is obvious;the compiling principle is explicit and the teaching methods are various. Shortcoming is that there is no practice and there are too more knowledge points. What’s more, phonetic teaching is too simple. The questioners and respondents are not noted in the dialogues.