This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters.

Chinese as a foreign or second language is the study of the Chinese languages by non-native speakers. Increased interest in China from those outside has led to a corresponding interest in the study of Standard Mandarin as a foreign language, the official languages of mainland China and Taiwan. However the teaching of Chinese both within and outside China is not a recent phenomenon. Westerners started learning different Chinese languages in the 16th century. Within China, Standard Mandarin became the official language of China in 1924. Standard Mandarin also became the official language of Taiwan after the Kuomintang took over control from Japan after World War II.

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] Chinese language study is also rising in the United States. The USC U.S.-China Institute cited a report that 51,582 students were studying the language in U.S. colleges and universities. While far behind the more than 800,000 students who study Spanish, the number is more than three times higher than in 1986. The Institute's report includes graphs and details on the popularity of other languages.^[4]

China has helped 60,000 teachers promote its language internationally, and an estimated 40 million people are now studying Chinese as a second language around the world.^[5]

[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 understanding of the Chinese language in the West began with some misunderstandings. Since the earliest appearance of Chinese characters in the West,^[6] the belief that written Chinese was ideographic prevailed.^[7] Such a belief led to Athanasius Kircher's conjecture that Chinese characters were derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, China being a colony of Egypt.^[8] 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.^[9]

Inspired by these ideas, Leibniz and Bacon, among others, dreamt of inventing a characteristica universalis modelled on Chinese.^[10] Thus wrote Bacon:

Leibniz placed high hopes on the Chinese characters:

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. Building on Ricci's and Ruggieri's work, 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

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.^[13] 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;^[14] instigated by Abel-Rémusat, Wilhelm von Humboldt studied the language seriously, and discussed it in several letters with the French professor.^[15]

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. ^[16]

[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.^[17] A quote attributed to William Milne, Morrison's colleague, goes that learning Chinese is

Several major difficulties stand out:

[edit] The characters (Hanzi)

The Kangxi dictionary contains 47,035 characters (simplified Chinese: 汉字; traditional Chinese: 漢字; pinyin: Hànzì). However, most of the characters contained there are archaic and obscure. The Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代汉语常用字表; traditional Chinese: 現代漢語常用字表; 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 (simplified Chinese: 现代汉语通用字表; traditional Chinese: 現代漢語通用字表; 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.^{[citation needed]}

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:

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, replied that the characters in the letter happen to all belong to that half of the 40,000 characters which he has yet to master.^[20]

[edit] The tones

Mandarin Chinese has four tones (simplified Chinese: 声调; traditional Chinese: 聲調; pinyin: shēngdiào), namely the first tone (flat or high level tone, 阴平, denoted by "¯" in Pinyin), the second tone (rising or high-rising tone, 阳平, denoted by "ˊ" in Pinyin), the third tone (falling-rising or low tone, 上声, denoted by "ˇ" in Pinyin), and the fourth tone (falling or high-falling tone, 去声, denoted by "ˋ" in Pinyin). Indeed, there is a fifth tone called neutral (轻声，denoted as no-mark in Pinyin) although the official name of the tones is Four Tones. Other Chinese dialects have more, for example, Cantonese has six. 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:

Note that this does not necessarily display tone; Mandarin also has a large number of homophones.

[edit] Homophones

Standard Mandarin has a large number of homophones (simplified Chinese: 同音字; traditional Chinese: 同音字; pinyin: tóngyīnzì). For example, the pronunciation shì is associated with over 30 distinct morphemes, including 是 (copula), 市 (city), 事 (business, matter), 试 (try, attempt), 室 (room), and 视 (to see, sight).

[edit] Where to learn

Chinese courses have been blooming internationally since 2000 at every level of education.^[22] 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 (simplified Chinese: 对外汉语教学; traditional Chinese: 對外漢語教學; pinyin: Duìwài Hànyǔ Jiāoxué). The Confucius Institute, supervised by Hanban (simplified Chinese: 汉办; traditional Chinese: 漢辦),^[23] 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. Taiwan has long been a place for students to study Mandarin.^[24] Today's popular choices for the Westerners who want to study Chinese abroad include the Beijing Language and Culture University in Beijing and the Mandarin Training Center (MTC) and International Chinese Language Program (ICLP) in Taiwan. The latter 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 and other languages.

[edit] Notable non-native speakers of Chinese

• Frederick W. Baller: British missionary, linguist, translator, educator and sinologist
• L. Nelson Bell: American Missionary father-in-law of Billy Graham
• John Birch: American missionary and namesake of the John Birch Society
• Cường Để: Vietnamese prince
• John DeFrancis: American linguist
• Dashan: Canadian stage performer famous in China
• Arif Dirlik: historian
• Wolfram Eberhard: German sociologist
• Ai Fukuhara: Japanese national table-tennis player
• Timothy Geithner: United States Secretary of the Treasury
• William Hootkins: American actor
• Herbert Hoover: American President
• Jon Huntsman, Jr: US Ambassador to China; former Governor of Utah.
• Bernhard Karlgren: Swedish sinologist
• Kenneth Scott Latourette: American academic historian
• Walter Henry Medhurst British missionary and translator
• Ho Chi Minh: Vietnamese revolutionary
• Chloe Mortaud: Miss France 2009^[25]
• Joseph Needham: English sinologist
• Michiko Nishiwaki: Japanese actress
• Timothy Richard: American Baptist missionary
• Sidney Rittenberg: American interpreter, Communist and businessman
• Kevin Rudd: Australian Prime Minister^[26]
• Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn: Thai princess
• Sidney Shapiro: American translator; acquired Chinese citizenship.
• Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky: Russian-born Bishop of Shanghai
• Gary Snyder: American poet and essayist. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
• Richard Sorge: Soviet spy
• Hudson Taylor: British missionary and founder of the China Inland Mission
• Elsie Tu: British-born Hong Kong politician
• Leehom Wang: American-born singer
• Samuel Wells Williams: American missionary, linguist, and diplomat
• Ruth Weiss: Austrian-born Chinese-naturalized journalist

[edit] See also

• Language teaching
• Chinese school
• Chinese-Ordered English (COE)

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard", David Moser