A little boy, the son of a Chinese Missionary, was asked what he intended to be when he grew up. He expressed his intention to be a Missionary, like his father. "What do you intend to preach?" was asked him. "I intend to preach Chinese" was his reply. It is to be hoped that students of this work will learn to preach Chinese, and not "Primerese".
The student must be willing to practise all that he learns, and must not be afraid of making mistakes. It is by making mistakes that one learns to talk correctly.
It is very important that the student should practise speaking to different people, and not confine his efforts to his teacher, or servants. Through familiarity, our servants soon learn to understand what we say, and will often successfully interpret some very marvellous Chinese, but this is no criterion that we are speaking the language correctly. A certain young Missionary of our acquantance, on being warned by a senior worker in the Mission that he was not speaking correctly, endeavoured to justify himself by saying that his "boy" understood what he said to him. One is reminded of the little boy who told his mother that he was cured of the habit of squinting, because he could now see two things where he could only see one before!
Care must be taken in the use of words holding meanings which are related to each other, but which have each of them their own specific use. In English we speak about a servant's "wages" a clerk's "salary" and a clergyman's "stipend". Similar distinctions are observed in Chinese, and these must be thoroughly understood, or the student will perpetrate some most distressing "howlers". A Missionary who possessed in a remarkable manner the gift of fluency in speech and accuracy of pronunciation, was one day heard, in translating an English address given in Foochow by a traveller who had visited the Yangtse Gorges, to speak of the bamboo towing line used on the boats that travel up the rapids, as a "só̤h", being ignorant of the fact that this particular kind of rope is always known by the name of "năk". Although he was a Missionary of experience, and a really fine speaker of the dialect, yet he perpetrated this "howler". With the knowledge that mistakes of such a kind are possible, the student will be on his guard against them.
