Research Of Colloquial Chinese:by Whymant A.Neville John

The topic of this paper is Colloquial Chinese,a primary oral textbook,which written by the British linguist Whymant A.Neville John in 1922.The textbook which focused on the way of teaching oral Chinese and the analysis of Chinese was written by Whymant when he was a teacher at Oriental Institute,University of London.It was composed of 4 parts.In the first part,Whymant showed his opinion on studying Chinese and offered some suggestions on learners,which had great influence on comtemprary Linguistic theories.In the second part,Whymant presented his arrangement,contrast and conclusion of 4 kinds of Pinyin created by Wade,Baller,Mateer and Williams.In the third part,the author demonstrated 4 basic courses which stressed on the essential words,sentences and grammar of learning Chinese.In the fourth part,he exhibited the English---Chinese new words vocabulary and marked Beijing dialect and Guangdong dialect.The former represented northern dialect while the latter stood for southern dialect.According to the teaching sequence,the thesis is divided into 5 parts.The first chapter accounts for research object,significance and status and introduces theories,methods and literature resources of study.The second chapter summarizes Whymant’s life stories and brief introduction to his other works.The background,content and compilation style of Colloquial Chinese is elaborated in this part,which presents the writing characteristics and rules in a comprehensive way.The third chapter pays attention to comb and analyse phonetic system of Colloquial Chinese,which shows the north-south distribution of Chinese dialects on the macro level and introduces the pronunciation methods of every single letters on the micro level.On the basis of arranging and comparing the 4 kinds of Pinyin,similarities and differences is found,which reflects popular phonetic system’s features of that times.The fourth chapter studies words and grammar.The vocabulary is not much in this book,but it is different in lessons.It is a good way to learn new words and sentences by translating and practicing.Neither vocabulary teaching nor grammar teaching can exit effectively without the other in the text study,thus,grammar notes appear in vocabulary teaching.Whymant has specific views on grammar rules of Chinese and he notices the significance of Chinese word order.the grammar system of Latin dosen’t apply to that of Chinese.The fifth chapter holds the basic evaluation for Colloquial Chinese.It is a primary oral textbook,practical and scientific,which provides learners with learning methods and shows the characteristic features of learning Chinese that time,while it is not comprehensive on analyzing some words,resulting in misunderstanding.