PREFACE.
The present work was conceived with the design of furnishing to the Chinese, residing In this country, the means of acquiring an elementary knowledge of English, such as would be of use to them in their intercourse with our own people. With this object In view the subjects selected have been those which are of every day use and the sentences have been made as brief as possible and are expressed in the most simple language. The pronunciation of every English word is Indicated in Chinese characters placed immediately beneath it.
But, as the work progressed, it occurred to the authors that it might also be made serviceable to English speaking persons who, for commercial, missionary or philological purposes, desired to acquire some knowledge of Chinese. With this object the pronunciation of the Chinese words has been indicated in Roman characters. The language of the book is not the official Chinese, the so-called Mandarin, but the dialect spoken by the natives of Canton and its vicinity, from which province come the greater number of the Chinese in America.
The following are the values of the letters used to indicate the sounds of the Chinese characters. The system of orthography is substantially that employed by Bridgman and Williams, but any one familiar with the books of these writers will see that the pronunciation of many of the words is often very different from that indicated by them. The sounds here given, however, both vowel and consonantal, are those given to the words by most of the Cantonese resident in New York. Of course the representation of the sounds in Roman characters can be only approximately correct, but this system of orthography will at least serve as a guide after the sounds of a few words have been learned from a native Cantonese. And this is all that can be said of any attempt to represent the sounds of one language by those of another.
