Chinese as a foreign language
The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with Western culture and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (March 2014) |
Chinese as a foreign or second language is when non-native speakers study
In 2010, 750,000 people (670,000 from overseas) took the
As of 2008, China had helped 60,000 teachers promote its language internationally, and an estimated 40 million people were studying Chinese as a second language around the world.[6]
Other than Standard Mandarin, Cantonese is also widely taught as a foreign language. It is the official language of Hong Kong and Macau and has traditionally been the dominant language among most Overseas Chinese communities. A number of universities outside Hong Kong and Macau offer Cantonese within their Chinese-language departments as well, especially in the UK and North America.[7] Taiwanese Hokkien is taught at the International Chinese Language Program,[8] Taipei Language Institute[9] and other schools.
History
The interpretation of the Chinese language in the West began with some misunderstandings. Since the earliest appearance of
Inspired by these ideas,
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...[15]
Leibniz placed high hopes on the Chinese characters:
I thought that someday, perhaps one could accommodate these characters, if one were well informed of them, not just for representing the characters as they are ordinarily made, but both for calculating and aiding imagination and meditation in a way that would amazingly strike the spirit of these people and would give us a new means of teaching and mastering them.[16]
The serious study of the language in the West began with
Ricci and Ruggieri, with the help of the Chinese Jesuit Lay Brother
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.[21] 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 (1815-1823), noted for its fine printing, is one of the first important Chinese dictionaries for the use of Westerners.
Due to the status of Guangzhou as the only Chinese port open to foreign trade and exchange in the 1700s,
In 1814, a chair of Chinese and
Local Chinese variants were still widely used up until a Qing dynasty decree in 1909 that mandated Mandarin as the official language of China. After this period, only Cantonese and Mandarin remained as the most influential variants of Chinese, the former due to the importance of maritime trade in Guangzhou and the emergence of Hong Kong as a key economy in East Asia. Chinese departments in the West were largely centered on Cantonese due to British colonial rule over Hong Kong until the opening of communist-ruled China starting in the 1970s.[25]
The teaching of Chinese as a foreign language in the
According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, there are 330 institutions teaching Mandarin 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 tests has been taken around 100 million times (including by domestic ethnic minority candidates).
Within China's Guangdong Province, Cantonese is also offered in some schools as optional or extra-curricular courses in select Chinese-as-a-foreign-language programs, although many require students to be proficient in Mandarin first.[26][27]
Difficulty
Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn for people whose native language is English, together with
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.[30]
Two major difficulties stand out:
Characters
While English uses an alphabet, Chinese uses
In his 1991 article "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard", David Moser states that an English speaker would find the "ridiculous" writing system "unreasonably hard to learn" to the level of achieving literacy due to the large number of characters. Moser argued that he was unable to "comfortably read" a newspaper even though he knew 2,000 characters.[31]
The 17th-century Protestant theologian Elias Grebniz, said that Chinese characters were:
through God's fate introduced by the devil / so he may keep those miserable people ever more entangled in the darkness of idolatry.[32]
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.[33]
The overwhelming majority of characters contain phonetic parts, but their use is complicated by several factors. First, Chinese characters have been in use for longer than English was written and yet saw very little orthographic reform to align them with how Chinese changed over time. Two, in mainland China phonetic parts were removed from some characters in order to make handwriting faster. Three, there are characters that have different readings depending on the word. The Japanese writing system suffers from the same issues.
Tones
I will give you an example of their words. They told me chou [shu in modern Pinyin[34]] 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.[35]
Moser also stated that tones were a contributing factor to the difficulty of learning Chinese, partly because it is difficult for non-native learners to use Chinese intonation whilst retaining the correct tones.[31]
Sources of education
Chinese courses have been blooming internationally since 2000 at every level of education.[36] 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 duiwai hanyu jiaoxue (simplified Chinese: 对外汉语教学; traditional Chinese: 對外漢語教學; pinyin: Duìwài Hànyǔ Jiàoxué; lit. 'foreign Chinese language teaching'). The Confucius Institute, supervised by Hanban (the National Office For Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language), promotes the Chinese language in the West and other parts of the world.
The
Many online courses in
Teaching the varieties of Chinese to non-native speakers is discouraged by the laws of the People's Republic of China.[39]
In Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, some Bumiputera and Indian send their children to Chinese primary school.
In recent years several independent language learners have used online resources and immersion techniques to learn Mandarin to various degrees of fluency, without relying on formal courses.
Among those who have documented their progress are Benny Lewis and Will Hart.[40]
Both focussed primarily on achieving oral proficiency by communicating with native speakers from an early stage in their learning.[41][42]
Notable non-native speakers of Chinese
- Viktor Axelsen: Danish national badminton player
- Kenji Doihara: Japanese general and World War II war criminal
- Ai Fukuhara: Japanese national table-tennis player
- Ronald Graham: American mathematician
- James Kynge: British, a regular commentator on Chinese and Asian issues.
- Nanking massacre.
- Sidney Rittenberg: American interpreter, Communist and businessman
- Katharine Gun: British intelligence agent
- Richard Sorge: Soviet spy
- George Thomas Staunton: English traveller, Orientalist and translator
- Adam von Trott zu Solz: German diplomat and participant in the German resistance to Nazism
- James Veneris: American Korean War veteran; settled in Shandong province after the war
- Ruth Weiss: Austrian-born Chinese-naturalized journalist
- Bob Woodruff: American television journalist, ABC News
- Mark Zuckerberg: American businessman, founder of Facebook[43]
- Thinaah Muralitharan: Malaysian of Indian descent badminton player
Politicians, government servants and nobility
- Cecil Clementi: Governor of Hong Kong from 1925–30
- Cường Để: Vietnamese prince
- Elsie Elliott: British-born Hong Kong politician
- Timothy Geithner: United States Secretary of the Treasury
- W. Michael Blumenthal: United States Secretary of the Treasury
- Henrik, Prince Consort of Denmark: Danish prince consort
- Herbert Hoover: US president (limited use)
- Ho Chi Minh: Vietnamese revolutionary
- Jon Huntsman, Jr.: US Ambassador to China; former Governor of Utah.
- Banri Kaieda: Japanese politician and former leader of the DPJ
- Kim Il Sung: North Korean leader
- Karim Massimov: Kazakh Prime Minister
- Park Geun-hye: South Korean President
- Matthew Pottinger: US politician and Deputy National Security Advisor
- Kevin Rudd: former Prime Minister of Australia[44]
- Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn: Thai crown princess
- Mulatu Teshome: Ethiopian President
- Kassym-Jomart Tokayev: Kazakh President
- Alice Weidel: German politician [45]
- Barbara Woodward: English diplomat and permanent representative to the United Nations
Educators, historians, linguists and writers
- Frederick W. Baller: British missionary, linguist, translator, educator and sinologist
- Pearl S. Buck: American novelist, author of The Good Earth, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
- John DeFrancis: American linguist
- Arif Dirlik: Turkish historian
- Wolfram Eberhard: German sociologist
- Peter Hessler: American writer and journalist
- Bernhard Karlgren: Swedish sinologist
- George Kennedy: American sinologist and developer of Yale romanization
- Joseph Needham: English sinologist
- Stephen Owen: American sinologist and literary analyst
- Phan Bội Châu: Vietnamese scholar and nationalist
- Vikram Seth: Indian academic
- Sidney Shapiro: American translator; acquired Chinese citizenship.
- Gary Snyder: American poet and essayist. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
- Ezra Vogel: American academic
- Samuel Wells Williams: American missionary, linguist, and diplomat
Missionaries
- L. Nelson Bell: American Missionary father-in-law of Billy Graham
- John Birch: American missionary and namesake of the John Birch Society
- Walter Henry Medhurst: British missionary and translator
- Timothy Richard: American Baptist missionary
- Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky: Russian-born Bishop of Shanghai
- China Inland Mission
Actors, entertainers and cultural performers
- Shila Amzah: International multi-award winning Malaysian singer-songwriter
- Sola Aoi: Japanese model and actress
- Jessica Beinecke: American entertainer and host of online show OMG Meiyu
- Vanessa Branch: English American actress
- John Cena: American professional wrestler[46]
- Dashan: Canadian stage performer famous in China
- Thomas Derksen: German-born online celebrity active in China
- Raz Gal-Or: Israeli businessman and online celebrity active in China
- William Hootkins: American actor
- Im Jin-ah: South Korean singer and actress
- Dimash Kudaibergen: Kazakh singer and lyricist
- Ladybeard: Australian cross-dressing entertainer
- Jeff Locker: American television host active in Taiwan
- Michiko Nishiwaki: Japanese actress
- Mira Sorvino: American actress
- Ryo Takeuchi: Japanese film director
- Abigail Washburn: American musician; singer, banjo player; performs in China and in the US
- Leehom Wang: American-born singer, ethnic Han, but didn't learn Chinese until 18[47]
- Oh Hyuk: South Korean singer, songwriter and main vocal of Band Hyukoh
- Kim Go-eun: South Korean actress
- Jeon Hyun-moo: South Korean announcer and performer
- Dean Fujioka: Japanese actor, musician, model
- Arieh Smith: American Youtuber known for his ability to speak Mandarin Chinese among other languages
See also
- Language teaching
- Chinese school
- Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language
References
- ^ Liu lili (27 June 2011). "Chinese language proficiency test becoming popular in Mexico". Archived from the original on June 29, 2011. Retrieved 12 September 2013.
- ^ (in 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.
- ^ "Get Ahead, Learn Mandarin". Archived from the original on 16 November 2006.
- ^ "How hard is it to learn Chinese?". BBC. 17 January 2006. Retrieved 12 September 2013.
- ^ Clayton Dube (31 July 2009). "Chinese language study is rising fast". Retrieved 12 September 2013.
- ^ York, Geoffrey (2 January 2009). "Papua New Guinea and China's New Empire". globeandmail.com. CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. Archived from the original on 16 January 2009. Retrieved 3 July 2018.
- ^ "Chinese University of Hong Kong". Retrieved 12 September 2013.
- ^ "621A(T) 台語一 Taiwanese I". ICLP@NTU (Taiwan) 臺大國際華語研習所. Retrieved 25 July 2019.
This is an introductory textbook to Taiwanese language, which is suitable for those of intermediate to advanced Mandarin competency. It brings together 24 lessons containing introduction to pronunciation, vocabulary, sentence patterns and daily conversation in a variety of topics such as classroom language, self-introduction, numbers, time, sports, entertainments, etc.
- ^ "TLI Textbooks中文自編教材". Taipei Language Institute. Retrieved 25 July 2019.
Taiwanese Textbooks台語教材介紹 生活台語 生活台語(實驗課程) 圖畫故事
- ^ 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.
- ^ Cf. John DeFrancis, "The Ideographic Myth".[2] For a sophisticated exposition of the problem, see J. Marshall Unger, Ideogram, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Cf. Umberto Eco, "From Marco Polo to Leibniz: Stories of Intercultural Misunderstanding"."From Marco Polo to Leibniz: Stories of Intercultural Misunderstanding" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-02-21. Retrieved 2006-11-29. Eco devoted a whole monograph to this topic in his The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress, Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass., US: Blackwell, 1995.
- ^ The Advancement of Learning, XVI, 2.
- ^ "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." - Lettre au T.R.P. Verjus, Hanovre, fin de l'année 1698 (from Wikisource) Cf. Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- ^ . Pages 184-185, 196-197.
- ^ Other researchers suggest that the dictionary was created during 1580-88 by a larger team of Chinese and European collaborators, still "co-ordinated" by Ricci and Ruggieri: Luís Filipe Barreto (December 2002), "RESEÑA DE "DICIONÁRIO PORTUGUÊS-CHINÊS" DE JOHN W. WITEK (ED.)" (PDF), Bulletin of Portuguese/Japanese Studies, 5, Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa: 117–126, archived (PDF) from the original on 2009-11-22
- ^ (in French) Ruggieri's biography Archived 2011-05-17 at the Wayback Machine at the Ricci 21st Century Roundtable database.
- ISBN 0-8248-1219-0. The transcription of the Nestorian Stele can be found in pp. 13-28 of China Illustrata, which is available online on Google Books. The same book also has a catechism in Romanized Chinese, using apparently the same transcription with tone marks. (pp. 121-127)
- ^ For more about the man and his grammar, see Matthew Y Chen, "Unsung Trailblazers of China-West Cultural Encounter"."Unsung Trailblazers of China". Archived from the original on 2006-12-17. Retrieved 2006-11-24. Varo's grammar has been translated from Spanish into English, as Francisco Varo's Grammar of the Mandarin Language, 1703 (2000).
- ^ Li (2006), p. 126.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Cf. Jean Rousseau & Denis Thouard (éd.s), Lettres édifiantes et curieuses sur la langue chinoise, Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1999.
- ^ Yue-Hashimoto (1972), p. 70.
- ^ Chinese Language Programme, South China University of Technology
- ^ Chinese Language non-degree program, South China Normal University
- ^ According to a study by the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California in the 1970s, quoted on William Baxter's site."How hard is Chinese?". Archived from the original on 2006-10-18. Retrieved 2006-10-24.
- ^ "Language Difficulty Ranks". 8 September 2009.
- Wycliffe's site.
- ^ a b c Moser, David (1991) “Why Chinese is So Damn Hard" (Archive). In: Mair, Victor H. (ed.), Schriftfestschrift : Essays on Writing and Language in Honor of John DeFrancis on his Eightieth Birthday. Sino-Platonic Papers No. 27 (Archive) (University of Pennsylvania). August 31, 1991. p. 59-70 (PDF document 71-82/260).
- ^ "durch Gottes Verhängniss von Teuffel eingeführet/ damit er die elende Leute in der Finsterniss der Abgötterei destomehr verstricket halte" - Quoted in Harbsmeier, op. cit., p. 300
- ^ "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 Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography, II (1941): 7-48; 113-152, reprinted in Adrian Hsia (ed.), op. cit., pp. 117-213.
- ^ Shu is equivalent to chou in French as ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨ou⟩ corresponds to ⟨sh⟩ and ⟨/u/⟩, respectively.
- ^ Translated by Isaac D'Israeli, in his Curiosities of Literature.[3] 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.
- ^ Cf. "With a Changing World Comes An Urgency to Learn Chinese",[4] The Washington Post, August 26, 2006, about the teaching of Chinese in the US.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "Reviews of Language Courses". Lang1234. Retrieved 12 Sep 2012.
- ^ "《广东省国家通用语言文字规定》全文_资讯频道_凤凰网". News.ifeng.com. Retrieved 2012-01-06.
对外汉语教学应当教授普通话和规范汉字。
- ^ "William Hart wins Grand Prize for Manchester in the Chinese Bridge competition". Manchester University. Retrieved 24 Jul 2023.
- ^ "Interviewing This Master of Oral Chinese Made Me Rethink Everything I Believed About Language Learning". ImLearningMandarin.com. Retrieved 24 Jul 2023.
- ^ "The power of immersion". MandarinRetreat.com. Retrieved 24 Jul 2023.
- ^ "Mark Zuckerberg speaks Chinese (English Translation)". Youtube. Archived from the original on 2021-12-19. Retrieved 2020-02-23.
- ^ 20 things you need to know about Kevin Rudd. The Age, 2007-12-07. Accessed 2008-09-07. "He is fluent in Mandarin and was posted to Beijing as a junior diplomat during his time with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the mid-1980s."
- ^ "Germany's far right preaches traditional values. Can a lesbian mother be its new voice?". The Washington Post. 15 May 2017. Retrieved 29 September 2017.
- ^ WWE, John Cena speaks Mandarin at WWE's historic press conference in China, archived from the original on 2021-12-19, retrieved 2019-02-03
- ^ Small, Mark. "West Meets East". Berklee College of Music. Retrieved 11 October 2014.
Further reading
- Chen, Chung-yu. "Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language: A Case Study of U.S.-born Taiwanese" (master's thesis in applied linguistics). University of California, 2013.
- Li, Qingxin (2006). Maritime Silk Road. Translated by William W. Wang. China Intercontinental Press. ISBN 978-7-5085-0932-7.
- Yue-Hashimoto, Anne Oi-Kan (1972). Studies in Yue Dialects 1: Phonology of Cantonese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-08442-0.
- Wu, Hsu-pai. "Teachers’ Perspectives on Chinese Culture Integration and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Teaching Chinese as a Heritage Language: A Multiple-Case Study" (Archive) (PhD thesis). University of Texas. May 2011.