III.
It has been suggested in the previous section that the vocabulary of the ordinary Chinese working man does not exceed a few hundred words, and it is obvious that any one who could secure a knowledge of these words would be on the high road to an understanding of the language spoken by the Chinese coolie. A thorough working acquaintance with the vocabulary of a coolie in all its varied combinations would be sufficient for most people, as the coolie, to all intents and purposes, speaks the language which his master speaks, and if his stock of Chinese words could be handled in the way that he handles them the person who possessed this faculty would have little left to desire. The full possession of this facility is more than the few succeeding chapters profess to offer the student, but at least it is possible to supply him with a fairly representative list of words and to indicate a few of the numberless combinations which they can be made to form. If he will take the trouble to make this list his own he will find it comparatively easy to enlarge his vocabulary by the aid of text books and dictionaries. Of the former, the two most in use are the Tzŭ Erh Chi, by the late Sir Thomas Wade, and Mandarin Lessons, by the Rev. C. W. Mateer. An Anglo-Chinese glossary of words in common use will be furnished in a separate volume. The written language would require a somewhat larger stock of characters, which cannot be used in precisely the same way, but this subject will be dealt with separately. The present and succeeding chapters will deal exclusively with the colloquial form of Chinese.
It may be as well to repeat at this point that Chinese do not write as they speak, and that when we write down words as they are spoken we are, so to speak, treading on the susceptibilities of the Chinese scholar, who regards written colloquial as unscholarly, but for educational purposes the prejudice of the Chinese pedant may well be ignored. It may be asked, "Why, in this case, is it necessary for the student of colloquial Chinese to learn the character at all? Would not a transliteration of the sounds as in an alphabetical language satisfy all requirements?" The experiment has been tried, but it has never been a success, owing, amongst other causes, to the complications presented by the four intonations referred to in the previous chapter, while it is most unsatisfactory to find one's horizon limited by ignor-
