The written language of China, viz. ideographs, is the same all over the extensive sphere of China proper, but its pronunciation is different almost in every province. The spoken language of the Chinese is, roughly speaking, the same as the written language, as is the case in the Western nations. Therefore, the Chinese residing in different provinces do not understand each other colloquially, except those educated in the Mandarine Chinese, which is in fact the pronunciation used in Peking amongst the Mandarins and studied by all Mandarins in provinces as well as those in Peking. The first difference between Chinese and Japanese is that the former is monosyllabic, whilst the latter is polysyllabic. The second difference, which is a natural consequence of the first, is that in Chinese there is no declension of nouns or conjugation of verbs, whilst in Japanese there are conjugations of verbs and a method of the formation of the cases of nouns which is in purport similar to declensions. The third difference is the position or order of words in sentences. The fourth difference is the difference of pronunciation of the Chinese ideographs, viz. characters, even when they are used in our writing in their original shapes. I will now explain in detail all these points in the succeeding pages. To begin with, Chinese is monosyllabic, as I said. Each word, which always has one signification, be it a noun or a verb, has only one sound. Thus a harbour in Chinese is _kong_, whilst it is _minato_ in Japanese; and a man in Chinese is _jen_, whilst it is _hito_ in Japanese. It is the same with verbs. The sound of each word of Chinese never changes, whatever position it may stand in relation to other words in the same sentence, that is to say, there is no declension and no conjugation. Each word is represented by a distinct ideograph, and, from what I have just said, it follows that the form of the ideographs also never changes, in the same way as the sounds do not change.