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Wikipedia

Chinese as a foreign language

March 05, 2023

"Learn Chinese" redirects here. For the song by Jin, see Learn Chinese (song).
See also: Chinese school and Confucius Institute

Chinese as a foreign or second language is when non-native speakers study Chinese varieties. The increased interest in China from those outside has led to a corresponding interest in the study of Standard Chinese (a type of Mandarin Chinese) as a foreign language, the official language of mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore. 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 the Kuomintang took over control from Japan after World War II.

In 2010, 750,000 people (670,000 from overseas) took the Chinese 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 taking Advanced 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. The USC 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 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 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 interpretation of the Chinese language in the West began with some misunderstandings. Since the earliest appearance of Chinese characters in the West,[10] the belief that written Chinese was ideographic prevailed.[11] Such a belief led to Athanasius Kircher's conjecture that Chinese characters were derived from the Egyptian 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 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.[13]

Inspired by these ideas, Leibniz and Bacon, among others, dreamt of inventing a characteristica universalis modelled on Chinese.[14] 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...[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 missionaries coming to China during the late 16th century. Among the first were the Italian Jesuits, Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci. They mastered the language without the aid of any grammar books or dictionaries, and are often viewed as the first Western sinologists. Ruggieri set up a school in Macau, which was the first for teaching foreigners Chinese and translated part of the Great Learning into Latin. This was the first translation of a Confucian 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 the Siku Quanshu, the imperial collection of Chinese classics. Some of his religious works were listed in the collection's bibliography, but not collected.

 
Page from the Portuguese-Chinese dictionary manuscript by Ricci, Ruggieri, and Fernandez (1583-88)

Ricci and Ruggieri, with the help of the Chinese Jesuit Lay Brother Sebastiano 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 the Grand Canal of China from Beijing to Linqing during the winter of 1598, Ricci, with the help of Lazzaro 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 of romanized 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 later Wade-Giles system. Although neither of the two dictionaries were published—the former only came to light in the Vatican Secret Archives in 1934, and saw publication in 2001, while the later 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 Jesuit Nicolas 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 by Michael Boym and his Chinese collaborators) that appeared in Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrata.[17][19][20]

 
Matteo Ricci, one of the first Westerners to learn 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.[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, 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 through unequal treaties, which exposed European scholars to a much larger number of Chinese varieties.[22]

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;[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 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 People's Republic of China started 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 the 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 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 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 Arabic, Japanese and Korean.[28] According to the Foreign 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 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.[30]

Two major difficulties stand out: characters and tones.

Characters

 
Chinese characters' graphy and other intralexical aspects largely increase the information load to master for English speakers.

While English uses an alphabet, Chinese uses hanzi, or Chinese characters, as its writing system.[31] 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 Hànyǔ Chángyòng Zì Biǎo), promulgated in the 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 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 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

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). 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 French Jesuit, in a letter, relates how the Chinese tones cause a problem for understanding:

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

See also: List of Chinese language schools in Taiwan and Language education
 
Chinese teacher Li Ying presenting on the use of the Internet in CFL studies at the 8º Congreso de Innovación y Tecnología Educativa at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, Monterrey.

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 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.[37] Popular choices for Westerners who want to study Chinese abroad include the Beijing Language and Culture University in Beijing, the Mandarin Training Center (MTC) and International Chinese Language Program (ICLP, formerly the Stanford Center) in Taiwan, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Many online courses in Standard Mandarin, Standard Cantonese and some other varieties 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 via podcasts. Software is also available to help students pronounce, read and translate Chinese into English and other languages.

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 sent their children to Chinese primary school.

Notable non-native speakers of Chinese

Politicians, government servants and nobility

Educators, historians, linguists and writers

Missionaries

Actors, entertainers and cultural performers

See also

References

  1. ^ Liu lili (27 June 2011). . Archived from the original on June 29, 2011. Retrieved 12 September 2013.
  2. ^ (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.
  3. ^ . Archived from the original on 16 November 2006.
  4. ^ "How hard is it to learn Chinese?". BBC. 17 January 2006. Retrieved 12 September 2013.
  5. ^ Clayton Dube (31 July 2009). "Chinese language study is rising fast". Retrieved 12 September 2013.
  6. ^ York, Geoffrey (2 January 2009). . globeandmail.com. CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. Archived from the original on 16 January 2009. Retrieved 3 July 2018.
  7. ^ "Chinese University of Hong Kong". Retrieved 12 September 2013.
  8. ^ "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.
  9. ^ "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
  10. ^ 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.
  11. ^ 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.
  12. ^ 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.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ Cf. Umberto Eco, "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.
  15. ^ The Advancement of Learning, XVI, 2.
  16. ^ "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.
  17. ^ a b "Dicionário Português-Chinês : 葡汉辞典 (Pu-Han cidian): Portuguese-Chinese dictionary", by Michele Ruggieri, Matteo Ricci; edited by John W. Witek. Published 2001, Biblioteca Nacional. ISBN 972-565-298-3. Partial preview available on Google Books. Pages 184-185, 196-197.
  18. ^ 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, Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 5: 117–126, (PDF) from the original on 2009-11-22
  19. ^ (in French) Ruggieri's biography 2011-05-17 at the Wayback Machine at the Ricci 21st Century Roundtable database.
  20. ^ Mungello, David E. (1989). Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology. University of Hawaii Press. pp. 167–171. 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)
  21. ^ For more about the man and his grammar, see Matthew Y Chen, "Unsung Trailblazers of China-West Cultural Encounter".. 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).
  22. ^ Li (2006), p. 126.
  23. ^ 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.
  24. ^ Cf. Jean Rousseau & Denis Thouard (éd.s), Lettres édifiantes et curieuses sur la langue chinoise, Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1999.
  25. ^ Yue-Hashimoto (1972), p. 70.
  26. ^ Chinese Language Programme, South China University of Technology
  27. ^ Chinese Language non-degree program, South China Normal University
  28. ^ According to a study by the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California in the 1970s, quoted on William Baxter's site.. Archived from the original on 2006-10-18. Retrieved 2006-10-24.
  29. ^ "Language Difficulty Ranks". 8 September 2009.
  30. ^ Quoted in "The Process of Translation: The translation experience". Archived from the original on 2005-11-26. Retrieved 2006-12-06. on Wycliffe's site.
  31. ^ a b c Moser, David (1991) “Why Chinese is So Damn Hard" (). 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 () (University of Pennsylvania). August 31, 1991. p. 59-70 (PDF document 71-82/260).
  32. ^ "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
  33. ^ "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.
  34. ^ Shu is equivalent to chou in French as ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨ou⟩ corresponds to ⟨sh⟩ and ⟨/u/⟩, respectively.
  35. ^ 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.
  36. ^ 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.
  37. ^ 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.
  38. ^ "Reviews of Language Courses". Lang1234. Retrieved 12 Sep 2012.
  39. ^ "《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。
  40. ^ "Mark Zuckerberg speaks Chinese (English Translation)". Youtube. Archived from the original on 2021-12-19. Retrieved 2020-02-23.
  41. ^ 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."
  42. ^ 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
  43. ^ 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.
  • Hoa Ngu Phuong Nam Center."Hoa Ngu Phuong Nam" (master's thesis in applied linguistics). Center of VietNam, 2021.
  • Hoa Ngu Tam Nhin Viet Center."Hoa Ngu Tam Nhin Viet" (master's thesis in applied linguistics). Center of VietNam, 2021.
  • Tieng Trung Hanzi."Chinese Hanzi" (master's thesis in applied linguistics). Center of VietNam, 2021.
  • Tieng Trung Thanhmaihsk."Tieng Trung Thanhmaihsk" (master's thesis in applied linguistics). Center of VietNam, 2021.
  • Tieng Trung Phượng Hoàng."Tieng Trung Phượng Hoàng" (master's thesis in applied linguistics). Center of VietNam, 2021.

March 05, 2023
chinese, foreign, language, learn, chinese, redirects, here, song, learn, chinese, song, also, chinese, school, confucius, institute, examples, perspective, this, article, deal, primarily, with, western, culture, represent, worldwide, view, subject, improve, t. Learn Chinese redirects here For the song by Jin see Learn Chinese song See also Chinese school and Confucius Institute The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with Western culture and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject You may improve this article discuss the issue on the talk page or create a new article as appropriate March 2014 Learn how and when to remove this template message Chinese as a foreign or second language is when non native speakers study Chinese varieties The increased interest in China from those outside has led to a corresponding interest in the study of Standard Chinese a type of Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language the official language of mainland China Taiwan and Singapore 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 the Kuomintang took over control from Japan after World War II In 2010 750 000 people 670 000 from overseas took the Chinese 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 taking Advanced 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 The USC 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 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 Contents 1 History 2 Difficulty 2 1 Characters 2 2 Tones 3 Sources of education 4 Notable non native speakers of Chinese 4 1 Politicians government servants and nobility 4 2 Educators historians linguists and writers 4 3 Missionaries 4 4 Actors entertainers and cultural performers 5 See also 6 References 7 Further readingHistory Edit 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 interpretation of the Chinese language in the West began with some misunderstandings Since the earliest appearance of Chinese characters in the West 10 the belief that written Chinese was ideographic prevailed 11 Such a belief led to Athanasius Kircher s conjecture that Chinese characters were derived from the Egyptian 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 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 13 Inspired by these ideas Leibniz and Bacon among others dreamt of inventing a characteristica universalis modelled on Chinese 14 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 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 missionaries coming to China during the late 16th century Among the first were the Italian Jesuits Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci They mastered the language without the aid of any grammar books or dictionaries and are often viewed as the first Western sinologists Ruggieri set up a school in Macau which was the first for teaching foreigners Chinese and translated part of the Great Learning into Latin This was the first translation of a Confucian 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 the Siku Quanshu the imperial collection of Chinese classics Some of his religious works were listed in the collection s bibliography but not collected Page from the Portuguese Chinese dictionary manuscript by Ricci Ruggieri and Fernandez 1583 88 Ricci and Ruggieri with the help of the Chinese Jesuit Lay Brother Sebastiano 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 the Grand Canal of China from Beijing to Linqing during the winter of 1598 Ricci with the help of Lazzaro 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 of romanized 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 later Wade Giles system Although neither of the two dictionaries were published the former only came to light in the Vatican Secret Archives in 1934 and saw publication in 2001 while the later 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 Jesuit Nicolas 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 by Michael Boym and his Chinese collaborators that appeared in Athanasius Kircher s China Illustrata 17 19 20 Matteo Ricci one of the first Westerners to learn 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 21 This grammar was only sketchy however The first important Chinese grammar was Joseph Henri Marie de Premare s Notitia linguae sinicae completed in 1729 but only published in Malacca in 1831 Other important grammar texts followed from Jean Pierre Abel Remusat s Elemens 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 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 through unequal treaties which exposed European scholars to a much larger number of Chinese varieties 22 In 1814 a chair of Chinese and Manchu was founded at the College de France and Abel Remusat 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 23 instigated by Abel Remusat 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 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 People s Republic of China started 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 the 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 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 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 EditChinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn for people whose native language is English together with Arabic Japanese and Korean 28 According to the Foreign 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 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 30 Two major difficulties stand out characters and tones Characters Edit Chinese characters graphy and other intralexical aspects largely increase the information load to master for English speakers While English uses an alphabet Chinese uses hanzi or Chinese characters as its writing system 31 The Kangxi dictionary contains 47 035 characters simplified Chinese 汉字 traditional Chinese 漢字 pinyin Hanzi 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 Xiandai Hanyǔ Changyong Zi Biǎo promulgated in the 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 Xiandai Hanyǔ Tōngyong Zi 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 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 College 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 Edit Mandarin Chinese has four tones simplified Chinese 声调 traditional Chinese 聲調 pinyin shengdiao 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 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 French Jesuit in a letter relates how the Chinese tones cause a problem for understanding 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 amp 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 EditSee also List of Chinese language schools in Taiwan and Language education Chinese teacher Li Ying presenting on the use of the Internet in CFL studies at the 8º Congreso de Innovacion y Tecnologia Educativa at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education Monterrey 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 Duiwai Hanyǔ Jiaoxue 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 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 37 Popular choices for Westerners who want to study Chinese abroad include the Beijing Language and Culture University in Beijing the Mandarin Training Center MTC and International Chinese Language Program ICLP formerly the Stanford Center in Taiwan and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Many online courses in Standard Mandarin Standard Cantonese and some other varieties 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 via podcasts Software is also available to help students pronounce read and translate Chinese into English and other languages 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 sent their children to Chinese primary school Notable non native speakers of Chinese EditViktor 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 John Rabe German businessman saved thousands of Chinese people from slaughter during the Nanking massacre Sidney Rittenberg American interpreter Communist and businessman Sagnik Roy Indian 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 40 Thinaah Muralitharan Malaysian of Indian descent badminton playerPoliticians government servants and nobility Edit 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 41 Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Thai crown princess Mulatu Teshome Ethiopian President Kassym Jomart Tokayev Kazakh President Alice Weidel German politician Barbara Woodward English diplomat and permanent representative to the United NationsEducators historians linguists and writers Edit 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 Chau 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 diplomatMissionaries Edit 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 Hudson Taylor British missionary and founder of the China Inland MissionActors entertainers and cultural performers Edit 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 42 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 43 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 modelSee also EditLanguage teaching Chinese school Test of Chinese as a Foreign LanguageReferences Edit 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 Gonzalez de Mendoza s Historia de las cosas mas 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 amp 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 pense qu on pourrait peut etre accommoder un jour ces caracteres si on en etait bien informe non pas seulement a representer comme font ordinairement les caracteres mais meme a cal culer et a aider l imagination et la meditation d une maniere qui frapperait d etonnement l esprit de ces peuples et nous donnerait un nouveau moyen de les instruire et gagner Lettre au T R P Verjus Hanovre fin de l annee 1698 from Wikisource Cf Franklin Perkins Leibniz and China A Commerce of Light Cambridge New York Cambridge University Press 2004 a b Dicionario Portugues Chines 葡汉辞典 Pu Han cidian Portuguese Chinese dictionary by Michele Ruggieri Matteo Ricci edited by John W Witek Published 2001 Biblioteca Nacional ISBN 972 565 298 3 Partial preview available on Google Books 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 Luis Filipe Barreto December 2002 RESENA DE DICIONARIO PORTUGUES CHINES DE JOHN W WITEK ED PDF Bulletin of Portuguese Japanese Studies Lisbon Universidade Nova de Lisboa 5 117 126 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 Mungello David E 1989 Curious Land Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology University of Hawaii Press pp 167 171 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 amp Denis Thouard ed s Lettres edifiantes 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 Quoted in The Process of Translation The translation experience Wycliffe Translation USA Archived from the original on 2005 11 26 Retrieved 2006 12 06 on 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 Verhangniss von Teuffel eingefuhret damit er die elende Leute in der Finsterniss der Abgotterei destomehr verstricket halte Quoted in Harbsmeier op cit p 300 Sans doute les idees contenues dans cette lettre sont exprimees 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 edifiantes et curieuses de Chine par des missionnaires jesuites 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 Lu 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 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 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 EditChen 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 Hoa Ngu Phuong Nam Center Hoa Ngu Phuong Nam master s thesis in applied linguistics Center of VietNam 2021 Hoa Ngu Tam Nhin Viet Center Hoa Ngu Tam Nhin Viet master s thesis in applied linguistics Center of VietNam 2021 Tieng Trung Hanzi Chinese Hanzi master s thesis in applied linguistics Center of VietNam 2021 Tieng Trung Thanhmaihsk Tieng Trung Thanhmaihsk master s thesis in applied linguistics Center of VietNam 2021 Tieng Trung Phượng Hoang Tieng Trung Phượng Hoang master s thesis in applied linguistics Center of VietNam 2021 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Chinese as a foreign language amp oldid 1141888479, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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