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Chinese as aforeign orsecond language is when non-native speakers studyChinese varieties. The increased interest in China from those outside has led to a corresponding interest in the study ofStandard Chinese (a type ofMandarin Chinese) as a foreign language, the official language ofmainland China,Taiwan andSingapore. However, the teaching of Chinese both within and outside China is not a recent phenomenon.Westerners began learning different Chinese varieties in the 16th century. Within China, Mandarin became the official language in the early 20th century. Mandarin also became the official language of Taiwan when theKuomintang took over control fromJapan after World War II.
In 2010, 750,000 people (670,000 from overseas) took theChinese Proficiency Test.[1] For comparison, in 2005, 117,660 non-native speakers took the test, an increase of 26.52% from 2004.[2] From 2000 to 2004, the number of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland takingAdvanced Level exams in Chinese increased by 57%.[3] An independent school in the UK made Chinese one of their compulsory subjects for study in 2006.[4] The study of Chinese is also rising in the United States. TheUSC's U.S.–China Institute cited a report that 51,582 students were studying the language in US 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.[5]
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 ofHong Kong andMacau and has traditionally been the dominant language among mostOverseas 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 theInternational Chinese Language Program,[8]Taipei Language Institute[9] and other schools.
The interpretation of the Chinese language in the West began with some misunderstandings. Since the earliest appearance ofChinese characters in the West,[10] the belief that written Chinese wasideographic prevailed.[11] Such a belief led toAthanasius Kircher's conjecture that Chinese characters were derived from theEgyptian hieroglyphs, China being a colony of Egypt.[12]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 orAdamic language. In hisAn 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 theconfusion of tongues.[13]
Inspired by these ideas,Leibniz andBacon, among others, dreamt of inventing acharacteristica universalis modelled on Chinese.[14] Thus wrote Bacon:
it is the use of China and the kingdoms of the HighLevant 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 withmissionaries coming to China during the late 16th century. Among the first were the ItalianJesuits,Michele Ruggieri andMatteo Ricci. They mastered the language without the aid of any grammar books or dictionaries, and are often viewed as the first Westernsinologists. Ruggieri set up a school inMacau, which was the first for teaching foreigners Chinese and translated part of theGreat Learning intoLatin. This was the first translation of aConfucian classic into any European language. He also wrote a religious tract in Chinese, the first Chinese book written by a Westerner. Matteo Ricci brought Western sciences to China, and became a prolific Chinese writer. With his wide 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 theComplete Library of the Four Treasuries, the imperial collection of Chinese classics. Some of his religious works were listed in the collection's bibliography, but not collected.
Ricci and Ruggieri, with the help of the Chinese Jesuit Lay BrotherSebastiano Fernandez (also spelled Fernandes; 1562–1621), are thought to have created the first Portuguese-Chinese dictionary some time between 1583 and 1588.[17][18] Later, while travelling on theGrand Canal of China fromBeijing toLinqing during the winter of 1598, Ricci, with the help ofLazzaro Cattaneo (1560–1640) and Sebastiano Fernandez, also compiled a Chinese-Portuguese dictionary. In this latter work, thanks to Cattaneo's musical ear, a system was introduced for marking the tones ofromanized Chinese syllables with diacritical marks. The distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants was also made clear through the use of apostrophes, as in the much laterWade-Giles system. Although neither of the two dictionaries were published—the former only came to light in theVatican Secret Archives in 1934, and saw publication in 2001, while the latter has not been found so far—Ricci made the transcription system developed in 1598, and in 1626 it was finally published, with minor modifications, by another JesuitNicolas Trigault in a guide for new Jesuit missionaries. The system continued to be in wide use throughout the 17th and 18th century. It can be seen in several Romanized Chinese texts (prepared mostly byMichael Boym and his Chinese collaborators) that appeared inAthanasius Kircher'sChina Illustrata.[17][19][20]
The earliest Chinese grammars were produced by the SpanishDominican missionaries. The earliest surviving one is byFrancisco Varo (1627–1687). HisArte de la Lengua Mandarina was published inCanton in 1703.[21] This grammar was only sketchy, however. The first important Chinese grammar wasJoseph Henri Marie de Prémare'sNotitia linguae sinicae, completed in 1729 but only published inMalacca in 1831. Other important grammar texts followed, fromJean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat'sÉlémens (sic)de la grammaire chinoise in 1822 toGeorg von der Gabelentz'sChinesische Grammatik in 1881. Glossaries for Chinese circulated among the missionaries from early on.Robert Morrison'sA Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815-1823), noted for its fine printing, is one of the first importantChinese 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,Cantonese became the variety of Chinese that came into the most interaction with the Western world in early modern times. Foreign works on Chinese were largely centered around this variant until the opening up of other Chinese regions for commerce throughunequal treaties, which exposed European scholars to a much larger number ofChinese varieties.[22]
In 1814, a chair of Chinese andManchu was founded at theCollège 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 theRussian 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;[23] instigated by Abel-Rémusat,Wilhelm von Humboldt studied the language seriously, and discussed it in several letters with the French professor.[24]
Local Chinese variants were still widely used up until aQing 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 toBritish 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 thePeople's Republic of China started in 1950 atTsinghua University, initially serving students from Eastern Europe. Starting withBulgaria in 1952, China also dispatched Chinese teachers abroad, and by the early 1960s had sent teachers afar as the Congo,Cambodia,Yemen andFrance. In 1962, with the approval of theState Council, the Higher Preparatory School for Foreign Students was set up, later renamed theBeijing Language and Culture University. The programs were disrupted for several years during theCultural Revolution.
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 aChinese language proficiency exam program, which tests has been taken around 100 million times (including by domestic ethnic minority candidates).
Within China'sGuangdong 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]
Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn for people whose native language is English, together withArabic,Japanese andKorean.[28] According to theForeign Service Institute, a native English speaker needs over 2,200 hours of intensive study, taking 88 weeks (one year and about 8 months), to learn Mandarin.[29] A quote attributed toWilliam 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 ofMethuselah.[30]
Two major difficulties stand out:characters andtones.
While English uses an alphabet, Chinese useshanzi, or Chinese characters, as its writing system.[31] TheKangxi 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. TheChart 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 Hànyǔ Chángyòng Zì Biǎo), promulgated in thePeople'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 Hànyǔ Tōngyòng Zì Biǎo) lists 7,000 characters, including the 3,500 characters already listed above.
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 theologianElias Grebniz, said that Chinese characters were:
through God's fate introduced by thedevil / so he may keep those miserable people ever more entangled in the darkness of idolatry.[32]
InGautier's novellaFortunio, a Chinese professor from theCollège 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. TheJapanese writing system suffers from the same issues.
Mandarin Chinese has fourtones (simplified Chinese:声调;traditional Chinese:聲調;pinyin:shēngdiào), namely the first tone (flat or high level tone, 阴平, denoted by "¯ " inPinyin), 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). There is also a fifth tone called neutral (轻声, denoted as no-mark in Pinyin) although the official name of the tones is Four Tones. Many other Chinese dialects have more, for example,Cantonese has six (often numbered as nine, but three are duplicates). In most Western languages, tones are only used to express emphasis or emotion, not to distinguish meanings as in Chinese. A FrenchJesuit, in a letter, relates how the Chinese tones cause a problem for understanding:
I will give you an example of their words. They told mechou [shu in modern Pinyin[34]] signifiesa book: so that I thought whenever the wordchou was pronounced, a book was the subject. Not at all!Chou, the next time I heard it, I found signifieda tree. Now I was to recollect,chou was a book, or a tree. But this amounted to nothing;chou, I found, expressed alsogreat heats;chou isto relate;chou isthe Aurora;chou means to beaccustomed;chou expresses theloss 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 useChinese intonation whilst retaining the correct tones.[31]
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 asduiwai 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'). TheConfucius Institute, supervised byHanban (the National Office For Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language), promotes the Chinese language in the West and other parts of the world.
ThePeople'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 theCultural Revolution.Taiwan has long been a place for students to study Mandarin.[37] Popular choices for Westerners who want to study Chinese abroad include theBeijing Language and Culture University inBeijing, theMandarin Training Center (MTC) andInternational Chinese Language Program (ICLP, formerly the Stanford Center) inTaiwan, and theChinese University of Hong Kong.
Many online courses inStandard Mandarin,Standard Cantonese and some othervarieties are available through commercial, governmental and nonprofit websites catering to speakers of English and over a hundred other languages.[38] Free and Paid-for courses are also offered viapodcasts. Software is also available to help students pronounce, read and translate Chinese into English and other languages.
Teaching thevarieties of Chinese to non-native speakers is discouraged by the laws of the People's Republic of China.[39]
In Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, someBumiputera andIndian 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 areBenny Lewis and Will Hart.[40]
Both focused primarily on achieving oral proficiency by communicating with native speakers from an early stage in their learning.[41][42]
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.
Taiwanese Textbooks台語教材介紹 生活台語 生活台語(實驗課程) 圖畫故事
对外汉语教学应当教授普通话和规范汉字。