Studies On Baller's "An Idiom A Lesson"

Frederick William Baller came from the United Kingdom, he was a Protestant Missionaries of the China Inland Mission.He arrived in China in 1873, and died in Shanghai in 1922. Baller lived in China for 49 years, he was a missionaries, sinologist and educator in a variety of roles. He was a very important figure in the Sino-British relation and cultural history. He was a very good sinologist. He prepared a number of Chinese books which were foreigners to understand China and the main tool for learning Chinese, These works are still a certain value for contemporary Chinese studies and foreign language teaching.An idiom a Lesson was a short course in elementary by Baller in 1920. The book was to aid the new-comer of the China Inland Mission who desires to speak "mandarin"-the language of China.The book was the last one which taught the missionaries to learn Chinese.This article is divided into six parts altogether:Part One:introduction, introduce the significance of topics, the present research, using theories, methods and the corpus source and so on. Part Two:describe the life of Baller and his major works. And analysis the content, structure and preparation of the principle of the book——An idiom a Lesson.Part Three:mainly analyse the voice systems of An idiom a Lesson, compare the voice systems of the China Inland Mission Symbols, Wade-Giles Symbols,National Script Symbols to the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet,then to analyze the characteristics of the voice of the words of the book. Part Four: Research on the grammar of An idiom a Lesson.First of all, the analysis of part of speech, analyse Baller's opinion of quantifiers, numerals and time use of the term rules and characteristics of them, and compare them to the modern Chinese term of these three categories; Followed by the phrase analysis, summarized in the phrase appear in the book;Finally,the Analysis of the special sentence pattern, from a structural and semantic analysis of the focus plane, such as "ba" zi ju, "shi" zi ju and bi jiao ju. Part Five, Evaluation the contribution of An idiom a Lesson to Chinese language teaching of the world, and to discuss its shortcomings. Finally, summary, summing up the views before the text to discuss the shortcomings of this article, as well as the direction of the future needs to be done.