Foreword
The lessons are written in Romanized Japanese, the transliteration of the Japanese sounds in the Roman alphabet. This is done because for the present purposes we are not concerned with the reading of the native script. The Hepburn system of Romanization is used throughout the manual, but the spellings adopted by other schools are found in the section on Japanese Romanization.
Reference is made several times in this manual to Japanese (kun) and Chinese (on) ways of reading. Kun is the pure Japanese pronunciation and on is the pseudo-Chinese pronunciation of the kanji (Chinese characters) adopted by Japan during the early period of its history.
The following are a few facts that students of this manual should constantly remember:
| (a) | Frequent drill is more valuable than a longer time spent in study with less frequency. Specifically, the result would be better if one studies three times a week for an hour at a time than if he spends four hours continously, only once. |
| (b) | The only way to speak a language is by speaking. Therefore, when one reads the lessons in this manual, he must be sure to read them aloud. As soon as he has the general sentence structure, he should no longer depend on his eyes. Spoken language must be acquired as far as possible through the mouth and ears, and not through the eyes. |
| (c) | One must be aggressive and bold in learning to speak a language. He should not be afraid of making mistakes; he should seize every opportunity to practice what he has learned. |
| (d) | One should never analyze any other language on the basis of English grammatical construction. He must not try to fit the foreign language into English; he must learn to fit English into the language he is learning. Each language has its own characteristic grammatical construction, and one must study it as such. This is particularly true of the word order in Japanese. |
| (e) | There is no “trick” in learning a language; the whole secret is drill, drill and more drill. One should repeat the type sentences over and over as they are introduced until they become automatic and part of oneself. |
| (f) | When one has advanced sufficiently in the lessons he should select some new words from the dictionary section of the text |
