In 2005, 117,660 non-native speakers took the , an increase of 26.52% from 2004. From 2000 to 2004, the number of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland taking exams in Chinese increased by 57%. An independent school in the UK made Chinese one of their compulsory subjects for study in 2006.
History
The understanding of the Chinese language in the West began with some misunderstandings. Since the earliest appearance of Chinese characters in the West, the belief that written Chinese was prevailed. Such a belief led to Athanasius Kircher's conjecture that Chinese characters were derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, China being a colony of Egypt. , 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'' , he suggested that Chinese was the language spoken before the confusion of tongues.
Inspired by these ideas, and , among others, dreamt of inventing a ''characteristica universalis'' modelled on Chinese. Thus wrote Bacon:Leibniz placed high hopes on the Chinese characters:
The serious study of the language in the West began with the 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 s. 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 in a work of 1626.
The earliest Chinese grammars were produced by the Spanish missionaries. The earliest surviving one is by Francisco Varo . His ''Arte de la Lengua Mandarina'' was published in in 1703. 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 ''?lémens'' ''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. 's ''A Dictionary of the Chinese Language'', noted for its fine printing, is one of the first important for the use of Westerners.
In 1814, a chair of Chinese and 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. dabbled in it;instigated by Abel-Rémusat, Wilhelm von Humboldt studied the language seriously, and discussed it in several letters with the French professor.
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 , 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 , which has tested over 142,000 persons.
Difficulty
Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn, together with , and , for people whose native language is English. A quote attributed to , Morrison's colleague, goes that learning Chinese is
Two major difficulties stand out:
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 , 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 lists 7,000 characters, including the 3,500 characters already listed above. Moreover, most Chinese characters belong to the class of , 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 In '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.
The tones
has four s，namely the first tone , the second tone , the third tone , and the fourth tone . Indeed, there is a fifth tone called neutral although the official name of the tones is Four Tones. Other Chinese dialects have more, for example, Cantonese has nine . 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:
Where to learn
Chinese courses have been blooming internationally since 2000 at every level of education. 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 . The Confucius Institute, supervised by Hanban , 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 from the 1950s onwards. Foreign students were forced to leave the PRC during the Cultural Revolution. 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 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. Private tutoring, either by person or via video conference software, with native Chinese speakers, is considered very effective to learn Chinese without going abroad.
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.
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
* : American missionary and namesake of the John Birch Society
* Arthur Calwell: Australian politician
* C??ng ??: Vietnamese prince
* Dashan: Canadian stage performer famous in China
* Wolfram Eberhard: German sociologist
* Herbert Hoover: American President
* Bernhard Karlgren: Swedish Sinologist
* Kenneth Scott Latourette: American academic historian
* Walter Henry Medhurst British missionary and translator
* Ho Chi Minh: Vietnamese revolutionary
* Michiko Nishiwaki: Japanese actress
* Timothy Richard: American Baptist missionary
* Sidney Rittenberg: American interpreter, Communist and businessman
* Kevin Rudd: Australian Prime Minister
* Sidney Shapiro: American translator; acquired Chinese citizenship.
* Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky: Russian-born Bishop of Shanghai
* Richard Sorge: Soviet spy
* Hudson Taylor: British missionary and founder of the China Inland Mission
* Elsie Tu: British-born Hong Kong politician
* Samuel Wells Williams: American missionary, linguist, and diplomat
* Ruth Weiss: Austrian-born Chinese-naturalized journalist
2 comments:
As more and more people learning to speak Chinese, the misunderstanding will vanish eventually. I believe more people will be fascinated about the Chinese culture.
You have such a deep view of Chinese, this passage really help me learn the situation of foreigners learning Chinese and the history.
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