First Textbook of the Chinese Spoken in America
Chinese Made Easy
Publication: New York and London: The Macmillan Company and Macmillan & Co., 1904. First Edition.
Notes: A landmark in the history of American Chinese language instruction, Chinese Made Easy is the first teach-yourself Chinese textbook published in the United States, and the earliest known attempt to teach the spoken dialect of Chinese immigrants living in the U.S., specifically, a variant of Cantonese. The book was co-authored by Walter Brooks Brouner, a Columbia University physician and amateur Sinologist, and Fung Yuet Mow (also transliterated Feng Yueh Mao), the superintendent of the Morning Star Mission’s Chinese school at 17 Doyers Street in Manhattan's Chinatown.
While nominally issued by Macmillan and printed in the Netherlands because of the specialized Chinese typesetting required, the production was probably self-published. The book does not address tones and uses English orthography to approximate pronunciation, indicating its target audience was not linguists but English-speaking learners, particularly missionaries and teachers working among Cantonese-speaking communities. The text also presents the San Zi Jing (Three Character Classic), a traditional Chinese primer, with large Chinese characters, phonetic English approximations, and literal and full English translations, a pedagogical approach meant to facilitate self-instruction.
The dialect taught is described in contemporary reviews as an idiosyncratic regional variant (Toisanese?). A contemporary reviewer in The Bookman (January 1905) noted that “however faithfully the Chinese co-author may have rendered the sounds of the dialect spoken in his particular home, it is not even pure Cantonese.” The Brooklyn Eagle more charitably concluded that this made the book “thoroughly American,” suited to the needs of readers in the U.S., “since most of our celestial immigrants hail from Canton.”
Includes an introduction by Herbert Giles, professor of Chinese at Cambridge and author of Chinese Without a Teacher, the standard Mandarin guide of the era.
xvi, 351, [1] pages. Large octavo (7-1/4 by 10-1/4 inches). Bound to open left-to-right in red cloth, decoratively stamped in gilt.
Edition + Condition: First edition. A very good copy of the scarce first printing, with some wear to spine ends and corners; cloth split about two inches along rear joint. Offered together with the second issue (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1935), bound in printed wrappers with a cancel title page, apparently using leftover sheets from the first edition. The second issue is about very good, with modest wear.
Item No: #365210
Price: $1,250