From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Western study of the Chinese language)
This article contains Chinese text.
Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters.
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 [hide]
1 History 2 Difficulty
2.1 The characters 2.2 The tones 3 Where to learn
4 Notable non-native speakers of Chinese 5 See also
6 Notes 7 External links
[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,[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 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.
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 ChineseLanguage, 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, initally 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: