Chinese as a foreign language

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Increased interest in China from those outside has led to a corresponding interest in the study of Chinese as a foreign language. However the teaching of Chinese both within and outside China is not a recent phenomenon. Westerners started learning Chinese language in the 16th century.

In 2005, 117,660 non-native speakers 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]

Contents

[edit] History

The fanciful Chinese scripts shown in Kircher's China Illustrata (1667). Kircher divides Chinese characters into 16 types, and argues that each type originates from a type of images taken from the natural world
The fanciful Chinese scripts shown in Kircher's China Illustrata (1667). Kircher divides Chinese characters into 16 types, and argues that each type originates from a type of images taken from the natural world

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, China being a colony of Egypt.[6] John Webb, the British architect, went a step further. In a Biblical vein similar to Kircher's, he tried to demonstrate that Chinese was the Primitive or Adamic language. In his An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language (1669), he suggested that Chinese was the language spoken before the confusion of tongues.[7]

Inspired by these ideas, Leibniz and Bacon, among others, dreamt of inventing a characteristica universalis modelled on Chinese.[8] Thus wrote Bacon:

“ it is the use of China and the kingdoms of the High Levant to write in Characters Real, which express neither letters nor words in gross, but Things or Notions...[9] ”

Leibniz placed high hopes on the Chinese characters:

“ j'ai pensé qu'on pourrait peut-être accommoder un jour ces caractères, si on en était bien informé, non pas seulement à représenter comme font ordinairement les caractères, mais même à cal-culer et à aider l'imagination et la méditation d'une manière qui frapperait d'étonnement l'ésprit de ces peuples et nous donnerait un nouveau moyen de les instruire et gagner.[10] ”

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 Macau, 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.

Matteo Ricci, a Westerner who mastered the Chinese language
Matteo Ricci, a Westerner who mastered the Chinese language

The earliest Chinese grammars were produced by the Spanish Dominican missionaries. The earliest surviving one is by Francisco Varo (1627–1687). His Arte de la Lengua Mandarina was published in Canton in 1703.[11] 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 Élémens (sic) de la grammaire chinoise in 1822 to Georg von der Gabelentz's Chinesische Grammatik in 1881. Glossaries for Chinese circulated among the missionaries from early on. Robert Morrison's A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, noted for its fine printing, is one of the first important Chinese dictionaries 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 European 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;[12]instigated by Abel-Rémusat, Wilhelm von Humboldt studied the language seriously, and discussed it in several letters with the French professor.[13]

The teaching of Chinese as a foreign language started in the People's Republic of China in 1950 at Tsinghua University, initially serving students from Eastern Europe. Starting with Bulgaria in 1952, China also dispatched Chinese teachers abroad, and by the early 1960s had sent teachers afar as Congo, Cambodia, Yemen and France. In 1962, with the approval of the State Council, the Higher Preparatory School for Foreign Students was set up, later renamed to the Beijing Language and Culture University. The programs were disrupted for several years during the Cultural Revolution.

According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, there are 330 institutions teaching Chinese as a foreign language, receiving about 40,000 foreign students. In addition, there are almost 5,000 Chinese language teachers. Since 1992 the State Education Commission has managed a Chinese language proficiency exam program, which has tested over 142,000 persons. [12]

[edit] 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.[14] 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.[15] ”

Two major difficulties stand out:

[edit] The 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 (traditional Chinese: 現代漢語常用字表; simplified Chinese: 现代汉语常用字表; pinyin: Xiàndài Hànyǚ Chángyòng Zì Biǎo), 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 (traditional Chinese: 現代漢語通用字表; simplified Chinese: 现代汉语通用字表; pinyin: Xiàndài Hànyǚ Tōngyòng Zì Biǎo) 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. To the 17th-century protestant theologian Elias Grebniz, the Chinese characters were simply diabolic. He thought they were

“ durch Gottes Verhängniss von Teuffel eingeführet/ damit er die elende Leute in der Finsterniss der Abgötterei destomehr verstricket halte.[16] ”

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 40,000 characters which he has yet to master.[17]

[edit] 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.[18] ”

[edit] Where to learn

Chinese courses have been blooming internationally since 2000 at every level of education.[19] 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 teaching of Chinese as a foreign language is known as (traditional Chinese: 對外漢語教學; simplified Chinese: 对外汉语教学; pinyin: Duìwài Hànyǚ Jiāoxué). The Confucius Institute, supervised by Hanban (traditional Chinese: 漢辦; simplified Chinese: 汉办),[20] 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.

The People's Republic of China began to accept foreign students from the communist countries (in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa) from the 1950s onwards. Foreign students were forced to leave the PRC during the Cultural Revolution.[21] Today's popular choices for the Westerners who want to study Chinese abroad 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 China had yet to open to the other parts of the world.

Several Mandarin courses are available online through various commercial web sites specifically catering to native English speakers. Free and Paid-for courses are also offered via podcasts. Software is also available to help students pronounce, read and translate Chinese into English.

Edmonton in Alberta Canada, is the first city in North America to incorporate Chinese language and cultural education within the context of the Alberta curriculum in public school system from kindergarten to high school education. The English-Chinese bilingual program is accessible to all children of chinese or non-chinese descent.

[edit] Notable non-native speakers of Chinese

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ (Chinese) "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. ^ Cf. John DeFrancis, "The Ideographic Myth".[4] For a sophisticated exposition of the problem, see J. Marshall Unger, Ideogram, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004.
  6. ^ Cf. David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology, Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden, 1985, pp. 143-157; Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001, pp. 49-55.
  7. ^ Cf. Christoph Harbsmeier, "John Webb and the Early History of the Study of the Classical Chinese Language in the West", in Ming Wilson & John Cayley (ed.s), Europe Studies China: Papers from an International Conference on the History of European Sinology, London: Han-Shan Tang Books, 1995, pp. 297-338.
  8. ^ Cf. Umberto Eco, "From Marco Polo to Leibniz: Stories of Intercultural Misunderstanding".[5] Eco devoted a whole monograph to this topic in his The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress, Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1995.
  9. ^ The Advancement of Learning, XVI, 2.
  10. ^ "Lettre au T.R.P. Verjus, Hanovre, fin de l'année 1698".[6] Cf. Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Machine translation: I thought we could perhaps one day accommodate these characters, if they were well informed, not only are usually represented as characters, but even at calculate and assist the imagination and meditation in a way that would affect astonishment the spirit of these people and give us a new way to educate and win.
  11. ^ For more about the man and his grammar, see Matthew Y Chen, "Unsung Trailblazers of China-West Cultural Encounter".[7] Varo's grammar has been translated from Spanish into English, as Francisco Varo's Grammar of the Mandarin Language, 1703 (2000).
  12. ^ Cf. Fan Cunzhong (范存忠), "Sir William Jones's Chinese Studies", 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.
  13. ^ Cf. Jean Rousseau & Denis Thouard (éd.s), Lettres édifiantes et curieuses sur la langue chinoise, Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1999.
  14. ^ According to a study by the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California in the 1970s, quoted on William Baxter's site.[8]
  15. ^ Quoted in "The Process of Translation: The translation experience"[9] on Wycliffe's site.
  16. ^ Quoted in Harbsmeier, op. cit., p. 300.
  17. ^ "Sans doute les idées contenues dans cette lettre sont exprimées avec des signes que je n'ai pas encore appris et qui appartiennent aux vingt derniers mille" (Chapitre premier). Cf. Qian Zhongshu, "China in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century", in Quarterly Bulltein of Chinese Bibliography, II (1941): 7-48; 113-152, reprinted in Adrian Hsia (ed.), op. cit., pp. 117-213.
  18. ^ Translated by Isaac D'Israeli, in his Curiosities of Literature.[10] 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.
  19. ^ Cf. "With a Changing World Comes An Urgency to Learn Chinese",[11] Washington Post, August 26, 2006, about the teaching of Chinese in the US.
  20. ^ Abbreviated from Guojia Hanyu Guoji Tuiguang Lingdao Xiaozu Bangongshi (国家汉语国际推广领导小组办公室).
  21. ^ Cf. Lü Bisong (呂必松), Duiwai Hanyu jiaoxue fazhan gaiyao (对外汉语敎学发展槪要 "A sketch of the development of teaching Chinese as a foreign language"), Beijing: Beijing yuyanxueyuan chubanshe, 1990.

[edit] External links