Beginning Chinese 114

This is Page 114 of Beginning Chinese by John De Francis, an excerpt from Lesson 26, “Distance and Separation.” All of the Chinese text on the left is written in Yale Romanization and the English translation is on the right. There is not a single Chinese character on this page because this is a textbook based on the Audio Lingual Method, and one of its theoretical foundations is structuralism. Under this theoretical framework, the writing system of a language is not considered as having the same importance as the spoken language. Therefore, Chinese characters are introduced in a separate textbook in the same texts.