On Mastering the Form and Use of the Most Frequent Words in the Mandarin Language

Chinese Recorder Volume 39

Published 1908

BY REV. D. WILLARD LYON, M.A.

“IN spite of the fact that learning to write Chinese is confessedly difficult, the advantages which accrue therefrom bulk so large that nearly every language schedule calls for more or less of it. Little thought seems to have been given, however, to determining what characters should be learned first. The student, though supposedly giving his main energy to the spoken language, is set the task of writing all the characters, frequent or infrequent, in some book with whose difficulties he is wrestling, or is told to practice some one’s list of frequent characters whose order of frequency is determined as much by we”n-li as by mandarin usage. The result is that by the time he has laboriously mastered his first five hundred characters he finds that he knows many which do not occur frequently enough in his daily reading to make it easy for him to retain them in memory, and that, furthermore, his stock of really frequent characters is so incomplete as to make it impossible for him to write many of the very simplest sentences in Chinese. Discouragement under such circumstances is not only natural but almost inevitable.

In the hope of being able to discover some means by which this disheartening element in the early toils of the language student might be largely eliminated, the writer, in connection with his work in the Kuling language school last year, addressed himself to finding out what the most frequently used characters in mandarin are and arranging them in an order suitable for ready acquisition. At the same time the more fundamental objective of facilitating an earlier mastery of the idiom which gathers around the commoner words was persistently kept in mind. The necessity of this latter motive was made the more evident by the observation that not a few who possess a fairly comprehensive vocabulary are very indifferent speakers of the language. The writer has even known some who, though able to write their thousand or more characters, are unable to compose a smooth Chinese sentence. Neither a large vocabulary, therefore, nor the power to write many characters, is in itself a great desideratum.* Ability to use in a correct and idiomatic way the words he learns is, after all, the chief test of the successful student.”

*I had to look this one up too.  It means something needed or wanted.

If this kind of scholarship was going on 100 years ago… why is there only NOW a massive interest in the study of Chinese!?