Spoken Chinese [antikvár]

GENERAL FOREWORD This is one of a series of self-teaching textbooks in more than thirty languages initially prepared and published for the Armed Forces and now offered to the general public. Like every other book in the series, it is the product of team-work between numerous collaborators. The authors of the various books have conformed throughout to the patterns developed by the experience of the group. A brief review of the origin and growth of the program to produce these texts will not only be of general interest in itself but will also provide some indications of the manner in which they may be most efficiently used as well as some of the limitations of their employment. Early in 1942, within a month of Pearl Harbor, the Joint Army and Navy Committee on Welfare and Recreation began consideration of the means whereby large numbers of troops might be instructed in the colloquial forms of the numerous languages spoken in the areas in which they were likely to be employed. A survey of materials already available for such instruc- tion confirmed their suspected inadequacy. Many of the pertinent languages had never been taught in the United States; few of them had ever been studied or described by competent linguists. Only the unusual textbook was designed to teach the spoken forms to linguistically untrained students, and even when a book was available, it was, as often as not, written in French, German, or Dutch, or for some other reason, not susceptible of general use. Consequently, the first necessity was a program of basic implementation which would provide materials, as nearly uniform throughout the various idioms as practicable, for elementary teaching of spoken language to Americans without special linguistic training or, indeed, aptitude. The form of the materials had to be such that they could be used for self-instruction in situations where no competent teachers were available. There had been little study of most of these languages in America. But the Army and Navy fortunately did not have to start completely from scratch, for several n-A