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Chinese as a foreign language

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Westerners did not take up the study of the Chinese language until the 16th century. Today, however, more and more Westerners are learning the language, largely due to greater commercial and cultural awareness of China. In 2005, 117,660 foreigners, including Westerners, took the Chinese Proficiency Test, an increase of 26.52% from 2004.[1] From 2000 to 2004, the number of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland taking Advanced Level exams in Chinese increased by 57%.[2] An independent school in the UK made Chinese one of their compulsory subjects for study in 2006.[3]

History

The understanding of the Chinese language in the West began with some misunderstandings. Since the earliest appearance of Chinese characters in the West,[4] the belief that written Chinese was ideographic prevailed.[5] Such a belief led to Athanasius Kircher's conjecture that Chinese characters were derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some even suggested that Chinese was the Primitive or Adamic language: a Briton named John Webb, an architect by profession, published his An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language in 1669. Inspired by such ideas, Leibniz and Bacon, among others, dreamt of inventing a characteristica universalis modelled on Chinese.[6]

Matteo Ricci, a Westerner who mastered the Chinese language

The serious study of the language in the West began with the missionaries coming to China during the late 16th century. Among them were the Italian Jesuits Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci. They mastered the language without the aid of any grammar books or dictionaries, and became the first sinologists. The former set up a school in Macao, the first school for teaching foreigners Chinese, translated part of the Great Learning into Latin, the first translation of a Confucius classic in any European language, and wrote a religious tract in Chinese, the first Chinese book written by a Westerner. The latter brought Western sciences to China, and became a prolific Chinese writer. With his amazing command of the language, Ricci impressed the Chinese literati and was accepted as one of them, much to the advantage of his missionary work. Several scientific works he authored or co-authored were collected in Siku Quanshu, the imperial collection of Chinese classics; some of his religious works were listed in the collection's bibliography, but not collected. Another Jesuit Nicolas Trigault produced the first system of Chinese Romanisation in a work of 1626.

The Spanish Dominican Francisco Varo (1627–1687) wrote the first ever Chinese grammar in any European language. His Arte de la Lengua Mandarina was published in Canton in 1703.[7] This grammar was only sketchy, however. The first important Chinese grammar was Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare's Notitia linguae sinicae, completed in 1729 but only published in Malacca in 1831. Other important grammar texts followed, from Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat's Éléments de la grammaire chinoise in 1822 to Georg von der Gabelentz's Chinesische Grammatik in 1881.

While a glossary for Chinese circulated among the missionaries from early on, Robert Morrison's A Dictionary of the Chinese Language was the first important Chinese dictionary for the use of Westerners.

In 1814, a chair of Chinese and Manchu was founded at the Collège de France, and Abel-Rémusat became the first Professor of Chinese in Europe. In 1837, Nikita Bichurin opened the first Chinese-language school in the Russian Empire. Since then sinology became an academic discipline in the West, with the secular sinologists outnumbering the missionary ones. Some of the big names in the history of linguistics took up the study of Chinese. Sir William Jones dabbled in it;[8]instigated by Abel-Rémusat, Wilhelm von Humboldt studied the language seriously, and discussed it in several letters with the French professor.[9]

Difficulty

Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn, together with Arabic, Japanese and Korean, for people whose native language is English.[10] A quote attributed to William Milne, Morrison's colleague, goes that learning Chinese is

a work for men with bodies of brass, lungs of steel, heads of oak, hands of springsteel, hearts of apostles, memories of angels, and lives of Methuselah.[11]

Two major difficulties stand out:

  • The number of Chinese characters: The Kangxi dictionary contains 47,035 characters. However, most of the characters contained there are archaic and obscure. The Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese (现代汉语常用字表 Xiandai Hanyu Changyong Zibiao), promulgated in People’s Republic of China, lists 2,500 common characters and 1,000 less-than-common characters, while the Chart of Generally Utilized Characters of Modern Chinese (现代汉语通用字表 Xiandai Hanyu Tongyong Zibiao) lists 7,000 characters, including the 3,500 characters already listed above. Moreover, most Chinese characters belong to the class of semantic-phonetic compounds, which means that one can know the basic meaning and the approximate reading of most Chinese characters, after acquiring some elementary knowledge of the language. Still, Chinese characters pose a problem for learners of Chinese. In Gautier's novella Fortunio, a Chinese professor from the Collège de France, when asked by the protagonist to translate a love letter suspected to be written in Chinese, replies that the characters in the letter happen to all belong to that half of the 80,000 characters which he has yet to master.
  • The tones: Mandarin has four tones. Other Chinese dialects have more, for example, Cantonese has nine (in six distinct tone contours). In most Western languages, tones are only used to express emphasis or emotion, not to distinguish meanings as in Chinese. A French Jesuit, in a letter, relates how the Chinese tones cause a problem for understanding:

I will give you an example of their words. They told me chou signifies a book: so that I thought whenever the word chou was pronounced, a book was the subject. Not at all! Chou, the next time I heard it, I found signified a tree. Now I was to recollect, chou was a book, or a tree. But this amounted to nothing; chou, I found, expressed also great heats; chou is to relate; chou is the Aurora; chou means to be accustomed; chou expresses the loss of a wager, &c. I should not finish, were I to attempt to give you all its significations.[12]

Where to learn

Chinese courses have been blooming in the West since 2000, at every level of education.[13] Still, in most of the Western universities, the study of the Chinese language is only a part of Chinese Studies or sinology, instead of an independent discipline.

The Confucius Institute, supervised by Hanban (汉办 abbreviated from 国家汉语国际推广领导小组办公室 Guojia Hanyu Guoji Tuiguang Lingdao Xiaozu Bangongshi) or the National Office For Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, is responsible for promoting the Chinese language in the West and other parts of the world.

For those who choose to study abroad, popular choices include the Center for Chinese Language and Cultural Studies in Taiwan and Beijing Language and Culture University in Beijing, the former was especially popular before the 1980s when Mainland China had yet to open to foreigners.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Template:Zh icon "汉语水平考试中心：2005年外国考生总人数近12万",[1] Xinhua News Agency, January 16, 2006.
  2. ^ "Get Ahead, Learn Mandarin", [2] Time Asia, vol. 167, no. 26, June 26, 2006.
  3. ^ "How hard is it to learn Chinese?",[3] BBC, January 17, 2006.
  4. ^ There are disputes over which is the earliest European book containing Chinese characters. One of the candidates is Juan González de Mendoza's Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China published in 1586.
  5. ^ See, for example, John DeFrancis, "The Ideographic Myth".[4]
  6. ^ See, for example, Umberto Eco, "From Marco Polo to Leibniz: Stories of Intercultural Misunderstanding".[5]
  7. ^ For more about the man and his grammar, see Matthew Y Chen, "Unsung Trailblazers of China-West Cultural Encounter".[6] Varo's grammar has been translated from Spanish into English, as Francisco Varo's grammar of the Mandarin language, 1703: an English translation of Arte de la lengua Mandarina, published in 2000.
  8. ^ See Fan Cunzhong (范存忠), "Sir William Jones's Chinese Studies", first published in Review of English Studies, Vol. 22, No. 88 (Oct., 1946), pp. 304–314, reprinted in Adrian Hsia ed., The vision of China in the English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1998.
  9. ^ See Jean Rousseau & Denis Thouard éd.s, Lettres édifiantes et curieuses sur la langue chinoise, Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1999.
  10. ^ According to a study by the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California in the 1970s.[7]
  11. ^ Quoted in "The Process of Translation: The translation experience"[8] on Wycliffe's site.
  12. ^ Translated by Isaac D'Israeli, in his Curiosities of Literature.[9] The original letter, in French, can be found in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses de Chine par des missionnaires jésuites (1702–1776), Paris: Garnier-flammarion, 1979, pp. 468–470. chou is written shu in modern pinyin. The words he refers here are: 書, 樹, 暑, 述, 曙, 熟 and 輸, all of which have the same vowel and consonant but different tones in Mandarin.
  13. ^ See, for example, "With a Changing World Comes An Urgency to Learn Chinese",[10] Washington Post, August 26, 2006, about the teaching of Chinese in the US.
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