v
in that pons asinorum, the native writer, who will interpret the sense of difficult passages in plain colloquial without being able to analyse the construction of even the simplest sentence. The greater command they have over the spoken language, the easier they will find it to have such difficulties explained to them without being able to judge themselves. The danger of becoming thus dependent upon the intelligence of a native assistant is obvious, and cases in which a student who has done good work because he has enjoyed the benefit of having a clever Hsien-chêng at his side, finds himself suddenly in great distress when he has to work with a less intelligent man or without any such help at all, are too frequent to need any further comment. The student should, therefore, in good time become accustomed to use his eyes, instead of his ears, in reading Chinese; and, in order to attain this end, I would advise him to commence studying the colloquial and the written Chinese at the same time, taking either branch in hand separately and just as seriously as though he were going to study two difficult languages like Latin and Greek. His progress in the spoken language will thus be less rapid than if he devote himself to colloquial studies entirely for the first, two or three years: but he will be less liable to discouragement when called upon to exert himself in the written language, decidedly the more difficult branch of his studies.
As to the latter, I would recommend him to begin by reading and translating, without a native teacher, but with the assistance of the Vocabulary in Volume II., the first 43 documents in Vol. I. of the Text Book, checking the sense of his own version with the translations contained in the Appendix of Vol. II. After this he should proceed in the same manner with Wade's
