Chinese as a foreign language or a second language is the study of Chinese varieties by native speakers. The growing interest in China from outside has led to an appropriate interest in Mandarin Standard ("Mandarin") as a foreign language, official language of mainland China and Taiwan. However, Chinese teaching both inside and outside China is not a new phenomenon. Westerners began studying Chinese varieties in the 16th century. In Chinese, Mandarin became the official language of the early 20th century. Mandarin also became the official language of Taiwan when the Kuomintang took control of Japan after World War II.
In 2010, 750,000 people (670,000 overseas) followed the Chinese Proficiency Test. By comparison, in 2005, 117,660 non-native speakers took the test, an increase of 26.52% over 2004. From 2000 to 2004, the number of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who took the Advanced Exams in Chinese increased by 57%. An independent school in England made China one of the compulsory subjects in 2006. The study of China has also increased in the United States. USC US-China Institute cited a report that 51,582 students are studying languages ​​at US colleges and universities. While far behind more than 800,000 Spanish-language students, the numbers are more than three times higher than in 1986. The Institute's report includes graphs and details on the popularity of other languages.
China has helped 60,000 teachers promote their language internationally, and an estimated 40 million people learn Chinese as a second language worldwide by the end of 2008.
In addition to Standard Chinese, Cantonese is the only other Chinese language variant that is widely taught as a foreign language. It is the official language of Hong Kong and Macao and has traditionally been the dominant language among most Overseas Chinese communities. A number of universities outside Hong Kong and Macau offer Cantonese Language within their Chinese speaking department as well, especially in the UK and North America.
Video Chinese as a foreign language
Histori
Interpretation of Chinese in the West begins with some misunderstandings. Since the emergence of the earliest Chinese characters in the West, the belief that Chinese writing is ideographic. Such conviction leads to Athanasius Kircher's assumption that the Chinese character is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese as Egyptian colonies. John Webb, the British architect, went a step further. In a vein of the Bible similar to Kircher, he tries to show that Chinese is a Primitive or Adamic language. In his book A History Essay Requires a Possibility That the Chinese Imperial Language Is the Ancient Language (1669), he suggested that Chinese is the language used before the confusion of tongues.
Inspired by these ideas, Leibniz and Bacon, among others, dreamed of creating a universalist characteristica modeled in Chinese. So write Bacon:
it is the use of China and the High Levant kingdom to write in the Real Character, which does not express letters or words roughly, but the Things or Ideas...
Leibniz placed great hopes on Chinese characters:
I think that someday somebody may be able to accommodate these characters, if someone gets good information about them, not just to represent the characters as they are usually made, but both to calculate and help imagination and meditation in an extraordinary way attack the spirit of these people and will give us a new way to teach and master it.
The serious study of language in the West began with the missionaries who came to China in the late 16th century. Among the first are Italian Jesuits, Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci. They speak the language without the help of grammar books or dictionaries, and are often regarded as the first Western cynicologist. Ruggeiri founded a school in Macau, which was the first school to teach foreign Chinese and translate part of the Great Learning into Latin. This is the first translation of the Confucian classic into any European language. He also wrote a religious treaty in Chinese, the first Chinese book written by Westerners. Matteo Ricci brought Western science to China, and became a prolific Chinese writer. With extensive language acquisition, Ricci impressed the Chinese letters and was accepted as one of them, benefiting greatly from his missionary work. Some of the scientific papers he wrote or wrote together were collected in the Quanshu Elbow, the imperial collection of the Chinese classics. Some of his religious works are listed in the collection bibliography, but not collected.
Ricci and Ruggieri, with the help of the Chinese Jesuit, Sauders Brother Sebastiano Fernandez (also spelled Fernandes 1562-1621), allegedly created the first Portuguese-Chinese dictionary between 1583 and 1588. Later, while traveling in 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 last work, thanks to the ear of Cattaneo's music, a system was introduced to mark the tone of Chinese syllables romanized with diacritical marks. The difference between aspirated and unaspirated consonants is also clarified through the use of apostrophes, as in later Wade-Giles systems. Although none of the two dictionaries were published - the first was revealed only in the Vatican Secret Archives in 1934, and saw the publication in 2001, while the latter has not been discovered so far - Ricci developed a transcription system developed in 1598, and in 1626 finally published, with slight modifications, by another Jesuit Nicolas Trigault in a guide to the new Jesuit missionaries. This system continued to be used extensively throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. This can be seen in some romanized Chinese texts (prepared mostly by Michael Boym and his Chinese colleagues) which appeared in Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrata .
The earliest Chinese grammar was produced by Spanish Dominican missionaries. The earliest surviving was Francisco Varo (1627-1687). His arte de la Lengua Mandarina was published in Canton in 1703. However, this grammar is only vague. The first important Chinese grammar was Joseph Henri Marie de Prà © mare's Notitia linguae sinicae , completed in 1729 but published only in Malacca in 1831. Other important grammatical texts followed, from Jean- Pierre Abel-Rà ©  © centered in 1822 to become Georg von der Gabelentz's Chinesische Grammatik de la grammaire chinoise /i> in 1881. Glossary for Chinese circulated among missionaries from the beginning. Robert Morrison's Chinese Dictionary (1815-1823), best known for his excellent printing, was one of the first important Chinese dictionaries for Western usage.
Because of the status of Guangzhou as the only Chinese port open to foreign trade and exchanged in the 1700s, the Cantonese became the kind of Chinese who interacted most with the Western world in early modern times. Foreign works in China are largely centered around this variant until the opening of other Chinese territories to trade through unequal agreements, which expose European scholars to a large number of Chinese varieties.
In 1814, a chair from China and Manchu was established at CollÃÆ'¨ge de France, and Abel-RÃ © Â © centered to become the first Chinese Professor in Europe. In 1837, Nikita Bichurin opened the first Mandarin-language school in the Russian Empire. Since then, cynology has become an academic discipline in the West, with secular sinologists exceeding the number of missionaries. Some of the great names in linguistic history take the study of Chinese. Sir William Jones dabbled; Incited by Abel-RÃ © Â © center, Wilhelm von Humboldt studied language seriously, and discussed it in several letters with French professors.
Local Chinese variants were still widely used until the Qing dynasty decree in 1909 which required Mandarin as the official Chinese language. After this period, only Cantonese and Mandarin remain the most influential variants of China, the first because of the importance of maritime commerce in Guangzhou and the emergence of Hong Kong as the main economy in East Asia. The Chinese department in the West was largely centered on Canton because of the British colonial rule over Hong Kong until the opening of communist-controlled China beginning in the 1970s.
Teaching Chinese as a foreign language in the People's Republic of China began in 1950 at Tsinghua University, originally serving students from Eastern Europe. Beginning with Bulgaria in 1952, China also sent Chinese teachers abroad, and by the early 1960s had sent teachers from afar as Congo, Cambodia, Yemen and France. In 1962, with the approval of the State Council, the Higher Preparatory School for Foreign Students was established, later renamed 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 that teach Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language, receiving about 40,000 foreign students. In addition, there are nearly 5,000 Chinese language teachers. Since 1992, the State Education Commission has administered a Chinese language proficiency exam program, whose tests have been conducted about 100 million times (including by domestic ethnic minority candidates).
In Guangdong Province, China, Canton is also offered in some schools as an optional or extra-curricular course in several Chinese languages ​​as a foreign language program, although many require students to be proficient in Mandarin first.
Maps Chinese as a foreign language
Difficulty
Chinese is considered one of the most difficult languages ​​to learn for people whose native language is English, along with Arabic, Japanese, and Korean. According to the Foreign Service Institute, a native English speaker requires more than 2,200 hours of intensive study, taking 88 weeks (one year and about 8 months), to learn Mandarin. A quote attributed to William Milne, Morrison's colleague, says that learning Chinese is
a work for men with brass bodies, steel lungs, oak heads, springsteel hands, the hearts of the apostles, the memories of the angels, and the life of Methuselah.
Some major difficulties stand out:
Character
While English uses the alphabet, Chinese uses hanzi , or Chinese characters, as the writing system. Kangxi dictionary contains 47,035 characters (Chinese simplified: ?? ; traditional Chinese: ?? ; pinyin: HÃÆ' nzÃÆ'¬ ). However, most of the characters that are there are ancient and unclear. General Character Chart of Modern Chinese (Simplified Chinese: ???????? ; Traditional Chinese: ?? ?? ???? ; pinyin: XiÃÆ' ndÃÆ' i HÃÆ' ny? ChÃÆ'¡ngyÃÆ'²ng Za ¬ Bi? o ) , enacted in the People's Republic of China, lists 2,500 common characters and 1,000 less common characters, while the Modern Chinese Language Character Chart (Simplified Chinese: ??????? ; traditional Chinese: ???????? ; pinyin: XiÃÆ' ndÃÆ' i HÃÆ' ny? T? NgyÃÆ'²ng Za ¬ Bi? O ) lists 7,000 characters, including 3,500 characters already listed above.
In his article entitled "Why Chinese People Are Very Loud", David Moser states that an English speaker will find a "silly" writing system that is "very difficult to learn" to reach literacy levels because of the sheer number of characters. Moser argues that he can not "read comfortably" a newspaper even though he knows 2,000 characters.
The seventeenth-century Protestant theologian, Elias Grebniz, says that Chinese characters are:
through God's destiny introduced by the devil/so he can make the miserable people deeper in the darkness of idolatry.
In Gautail's novel Fortunio, a Chinese professor from CollÃÆ'¨ge de France, when asked by the protagonist to translate a love letter suspected to be written in Mandarin, replied that the character in the letter happened to all belonging to half of 40,000 characters that he has not mastered.
Tone
Chinese Mandarin has four tones (simplified Chinese: ?? ; traditional Chinese: <; pinyin: < i> sh? ngdiÃÆ' o ), ie the first note (flat tone or high note, ??, denoted by "Ã,¯" in Pinyin), the second note (rising or high tone, ??, denoted by "?" In Pinyin), the third note (rising or low note, ?, denoted by "?" In Pinyin), and all four tones high-fall, ??, denoted by "` "in Pinyin). There is also a fifth note called neutral (??, denoted as no sign in Pinyin) although the official name of the tone is Four Tones. Many other Chinese dialects have more, for example, Canton has six (often nine, but three are duplicate). In most Western languages, the tone is only used to express emphasis or emotion, not to distinguish meaning as in Chinese. A French Jesuit, in a letter, recounted how Chinese tones caused trouble to understand:
I will give you an example of their words. They told me chou shu in modern Pinyin] signifies a book: so I think every time the word chou is pronounced, a book is the subject. Not all! Chou , next time I hear it, I find it signifies a tree. Now I have to remember, chou is a book, or a tree. But this does not mean anything; chou , I found, states also heats up large; chou is related; chou is Aurora; chou means getting used to it; chou represents the loss of the bet, & amp; c. I do not have to finish it, do I try to give you all the significance.
Moser also stated that tone is a factor that contributes to Chinese learning difficulties, partly because it is difficult for non-native learners to know how to convey emotions using intonation while maintaining the correct tone.
Educational resources
Chinese language courses have been rife internationally since 2000 at every level of education. However, in most Western universities, the study of Chinese is only part of Chinese Studies or Synthesis, rather than an independent discipline. The Chinese language as a foreign language is known as duiwai hanyu jiaoxue (Simplified Chinese: ?????? ; Traditional Chinese: ?????? ; pinyin: DuÃÆ'¬wÃÆ' i HÃÆ' ny? JiÃÆ' oxuÃÆ' Â © ). The Confucian Institute, which is overseen by Hanban (National Office of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language), promotes Chinese in the West and other parts of the world.
The People's Republic of China began to accept foreign students from communist countries (in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa) from 1950 onwards. Foreign students were forced to leave the PRC during the Cultural Revolution. Taiwan has long been a place for students to learn Mandarin. Popular choices for Westerners who want to study Chinese abroad include Beijing Language and Culture University in Beijing, Mandarin Training Center (MTC) and International Chinese Language Program (ICLP, formerly at Stanford Center) in Taiwan, and China University of Hong Kong.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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