In his preface of A Grammar of the Chinese Language (in Chinese, 通用漢言之法. Serampore: Printed at the Mission Press, 1815), written in Macao in 1811, Robert Morrison (1782-1834), the first Christian Protestant missionary in China, asserted:
"To know something of the Chinese language is a very easy thing; — to know as much of it as will answer main useful and important purposes is not extremely difficult; — but to be master of the Chinese language, a point to which the writer has yet to look forward, he considers extremely difficult. However the difficulty is not insuperable. It is "a diffliculty wlhich" (in the words of Sir William Jones [the great British Orientalist], when speaking of the Persian language) "like all others in the world, will be insensibly surmounted by the habit of industry and perseverance, without which no great design was ever accomplished." (p. iii-iv)
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