Excerpt from The History of Esarhaddon: Son of Sennacherib King of Assyria, B. C. 681-668 This little work is intended to assist beginners in the Chinese spoken language. The request has often been made to me, to prepare a simple work in the form of a Vocabulary, as being a want felt by learners. The attempt is here made to supply this want, and to provide a manual which may be suitable for those, who wish to acquire the common phrases of conversation, without attempting to unravel the more subtle intricacies of the language. In the first part of the work the standard Mandarin orthography has been used. It is found in a printed form in the Wu fang yuen yin, a compact and useful native dictionary which may be advantageously consulted for the sounds of words. Farther on, (beginning at the 25th page) I have adopted the peculiarities of the Peking dialect, - which are given with great fulness in Sir Thomas Wade's recent and valuable works "The book of Experiments," and "Elementary Course." In the Appendix will be found the laws of the Peking dialect in regard to tones which will be of assistance to those who may be perplexed by a multitude of seeming irregularities in that dialect. Those are here reduced to a system of laws sixteen in number. All who desire to become really good speakers in this language should study the tones. The knowledge of this peculiarity in Chinese words, lends great distinctness to what is said, and the dryness of the study is much more than compensated, by the pleasure found in being readily understood. The difficulty experienced in distinguishing and learning the tones is much less than is generally supposed. The tones are marked in this work chiefly (from p. 1 to p. 52) according to the standard five-tone system, or that now prevailing at Nanking, and in the northern part of Kiang-su and Ngan-hwei. Such is the system adhered to in the native Mandarin dictionary mentioned above, and by Premare, Morrison, Medhurst, and other authors. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.