【Haichuan Fun English】Word Day! This is how the people of the Qing Dynasty learned English!
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Forwarding the network: You may have seen such a joke: A middle school student’s English textbook contained these terrifying words: Dad died (bus), Grandpa died (yes), Brother died (girls), Sister died (Mis), Everyone died (school)… I have also personally gone through, or am still going through, this inhumane process of learning English, sadly writing familiar Chinese characters beneath those awkward-looking letters. Have you ever thought about how people learned *English in ancient times? Is this Pinyin system, which has been criticized countless times by English teachers, really wrong? English textbooks from 150 years ago give us the answer – those highly learned scholars of the Qing dynasty actually... learned English in just this way!
This is a Qing dynasty English textbook bearing the inscription “the 10th year of Xianfeng” (1860): it begins with an “English Glossary Index,” indicating that “Chinese characters are read from right to left, while English letters are read from left to right.”
The content consists of familiar English sentence patterns and Chinese phonetic notations:
Each cell contains an English sentence. The top is the Chinese sentence structure, the middle is the English sentence structure, and the bottom is the Chinese pinyin. So what we hear is this pronunciation: “Less one half of your price”: “Leesi, Meng, Haf, Yafu, You, Puliisi”. “Tomorrow I give you an answer”: “Toma Liu, Anyi, Jifu, You, Anwu Shiwei”. As for something related to my friend: “Tu, Du, Huifu, Maiyi, Wuluntuo”. When looking at just the Chinese characters, it seems like garbled text. Yet at that time, everyone thought it was only natural. The textbook’s table of contents states: “Only the learner should ponder it for themselves””
Even Zeng Jize, the son of the famous official and literary figure Zeng Guofan and a diplomat in the Qing dynasty, had notes of this kind:
It is undeniable that Zeng Jizhe was an outstanding diplomat; he was also the first Qing dynasty diplomat in Chinese history to wish the foreign envoys stationed in Beijing a \"Happy New Year\" on New Year’s Day according to the Western calendar. Although his “Happy New Year” phrase, according to the private “annotations” in his notes, should have been said as: “Ha ni wu jiong er”. With a strong Xiangxiang accent~ but don’t think they just go with the crowd! It is said that Zeng Jize was also aware that one could learn English using phonetic symbols, but he preferred his own invented method of combining sounds from Western characters. He also praised it, saying, “Using the fanqie method is a way for phonetic transcription.”
I see; the way we learn* is based on reasons.
I really liked this when I was first learning English:lol
It’s easy for us to study English now, there are many translation software to help us