Twenty Lectures on Chinese Culture

Written with the two-fold purpose of increasing proficiency in the language and affording an insight into Chinese civilization, this unusual book has lectures on such varied subjects as the people and culture of China, the geographical environment, the history, traditional and present government, the traditional agricultural economy, contemporary agriculture and industry, and Chinese literature, language, and philosophy.

Each of the twenty lectures is divided into six parts: vocabulary, romanized version of the lecture, character version, phrases and sentences for translation from Chinese to English and from English to Chinese, and questions.

The book introduces approximately 1,070 vocabulary items, all in the Yale romanization, each lecture averaging 55 new items carefully woven in with the old ones in the phrases and sentences for translation. There are two kinds of questions: those based on the text and those leading to a general discussion of Chinese culture. Prepared under contract with the U.S. Office of Education, the book has been treated in classrooms since 1963, Two volumes. Yale Linguistic Series. Mr. Huang is an instructor at the Institute of Far Eastern Languages, Yale University, and the collaborators were also at Yale during preparation of the book.