Lao She taught foreigners to speak Chinese

　　The writer Lao She not only wrote a lot of works in his life, but also had an education and teaching career for nearly 30 years. Teaching Chinese as a foreign language in the UK is a particularly important part of his overseas experience.

In the 1920s, Mr. Lao She taught Chinese in the Chinese Department of Oriental College, University of London. During this period, he participated in the compilation of a set of Chinese phonograph record textbooks - "Voice Films", which is also the earliest set of systematic audio textbooks for Chinese language teaching in my country.

　　In 1924, at the age of 25, Lao She went to London and started his little-known career teaching Chinese as a foreign language for five years.

These five years have been a critical stage for Lao She to embark on the road of literary creation and become a literary master. Most of the novels such as "Lao Zhang's Philosophy", "Zhao Ziyue" and "Two Horses" are stored in the quiet library of the Oriental College, University of London. At the same time, he served successively as a "Chinese lecturer" and "standard Chinese Mandarin and Chinese classical literature lecturer" at the Oriental College, teaching Chinese oral Chinese, translation, ancient Chinese and historical anthology to students in the Department of Chinese Language, and he also taught with colleagues Anthology of Taoism and Buddhism, writing class.

　　In the prose "Oriental Academy", Lao She recorded his Chinese teaching in detail, and described the students in this way: "There are almost no restrictions on the students who come here. In terms of age, some are seventy-year-old old men or Old women, some are teenage boys or girls. As long as you pay the tuition fee, you can enter the school. Therefore, one person learns the same thing, and there are very few students who happen to learn the same thing. Take the Chinese Language Department as an example, when I was there When I was a student, there were two elderly people in their 70s: one old man specialized in learning Chinese characters, and he didn't care what they were pronounced, so he appointed a British lecturer to teach him. The other old man appointed Learn from me, because he pays great attention to pronunciation; he has a good study of languages, he knows ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and when he is in his seventies, he wants to hear what Chinese is like; he has learned it for a while Chinese, he chose Japanese again. These two old people are very hardworking, although their hair is white, but their hearts are not stupid. Apart from this pair of old people, there are many students: some learn languages, some study, and some I got my degree at the University of London and came to prepare my thesis. Some read Yuanqu, some read "Hanshu", and some want to go to China, so let's learn a few words first. Some have lived in China for ten or eight years and want to go to China. Further studies... In short, they learn different homework, different levels, different class time, and different teachers. In this way, one person is one class, and the professor and two lecturers are busy all day long. The youngest of these students Only twelve years old."

　　During this period, Lao She (CCShu), British professor J. Percy Bruce and lecturer E. Dora Edwards collaborated to compile the world's earliest Chinese phonograph record textbook - "Voice Film".

Lao She is in charge of editing the Chinese part. All the Chinese characters in the texts and new words in the book are handwritten by Lao She, and the texts and new words in the book are also recorded by Lao She.

　　Compiling textbooks and writing novels have many similarities, but there are also many differences.

In order to better write teaching materials, Lao She improved his English by reading British novels.

The tradition of British humorous literature has a long history, and there are many masterpieces. The most representative writer is Dickens. His novels have brought immeasurable influence on the compilation of Lao She's textbooks.

It is very difficult to write the content of a textbook entirely by yourself. It is Lao She's original intention to build a bridge between Chinese and English while learning from others.

In addition to reading a large number of British novels, Lao She also collected corpus in a planned way, collected and sorted out various actual scenes, compared Chinese and English cultures, read a lot of textbooks, and organized and stored language materials.

With the efforts of Lao She and other editors, the continuous simulation of scenarios and cultural integration, the textbook "Speech and Sound Films" was finally successfully completed.

　　According to the data, the disc was published around 1926. There are 16 discs and 32 sides, 15 of which recorded 30 lessons. The first disc is used as a preface, which is a pronunciation exercise. The fable "Sour Grapes", the other side is the twenty-fifth episode of Cao Xueqin's "Dream of Red Mansions".

Each album is packed with a Linga-style sleeve, on which the full name of the pronunciation recorder is Chicn Chun Shu, a lecturer of Chinese at the University of London's Oriental College, also known as Shu Qingchun.

It can be seen from the publication notes that from the perspective of the division of labor, Lao She is responsible for writing the dialogue texts from the 16th class to the 27th class, and all the texts from the 28th class to the 30th class Writing, roughly accounts for 43% of the pages of all Chinese texts in the second volume, and accounts for more than 60% in terms of pronunciation content, and it is a relatively complicated part of the text.

The content of the texts before Lesson 15 is relatively simple, it is the pronunciation of words and words, and some short sentences, which do not constitute the content of the topic.

Starting from the sixteenth class that Lao She was in charge of, the conversation part has topics, one topic after another, a total of 15 topics, such as "railway station", "game", "business conversation", "news", "foreign clothing store", "bank", etc. , some of the topics are not only vivid in language, but also novel in content, conveying some of the author's thoughts and ideas. The addiction to reading novels is very strong. To be honest, the novels published recently are much better than before. Because the new novels try their best to describe a certain event, with emotion, scene and doctrine. The old novels are long and dull, a little No vitality. Besides, it’s written in vernacular now, and it’s lively and interesting, don’t you think so. B: Yes, I also think the new novel is interesting because it has some literary value.”

　　After the teacher's teaching, the Chinese level of those students has improved a lot.

Lao She wrote in the article "Oriental Academy": "I helped them take the exam, and the exam questions were not easy. For speech, one must be able to talk to Chinese people; for writing, one must be able to read editorials and news in major newspapers, and be able to read Chinese The exercises and official documents are translated into English. The same is true for those who learn Chinese, and the same is true for those who learn other languages. It is amazing!" "Speech and Sound Films" was popular in the 1920s and 1940s, and was later published by Hong Kong as a set of new Lingge style Chinese textbooks, but the level of the latter is obviously inferior to that of its predecessor.

　　"At that time, he was 25 years old. His voice was very clear and high-pitched. It was not as deep as the voice of his later years, but he knew it was Shu Qingchun's voice. The standard Beijing accent was very beautiful and crisp." In 1994, Lai, the Netherlands The College of Chinese Studies at the University of Dayton donated a complete set of "Speech and Sound Films" to the Museum of Modern Chinese Literature.

According to this set of materials, the first and second volumes of the textbook "Speech and Sound Films" were completely copied into the "Complete Works of Lao She" Volume 19, and his sound works were also recorded on CDs. Heard it in the exhibition hall of the Museum of Modern Chinese Literature.

Mr. Shu Yi once commented that this "Speech and Sound Film" is different from ordinary Chinese textbooks. Its characteristics include: the content is aimed at adults rather than children, it is not a primary school textbook but an adult textbook, and it involves a wide range of content, specific and detailed, Very practical value; the language content is mainly based on Beijing, not other places, but it is applicable all over the country; the content of the text is modern spoken language, without deliberately paying attention to the so-called grammar, mainly based on the idiomatic tone, and the sentences are relatively short and catchy .

Over the past century, many changes have taken place in the Beijing dialect. There are some sayings and words in "Speech and Sound Film", which are now very unfamiliar and have become "past tense".

Therefore, from the perspective of linguistics, this textbook has become a precious historical material of language and culture, and Mr. Lao She has also become one of the originators of Chinese language teaching overseas.

　　Guanshan

　　Qilu Evening News