More and more Westerners learn the Chinese language, due to commerical and cultural reason. 117,660 foreigners take the HSK in 2005, an increase of 26.52% from 2004 [1]. An independent school in UK has gone so far has making Chinese of their compulsory subject for study[2].
History
The understanding of the Chinese language in the West began with misunderstanding. Since the earliest appearance of Chinese characters in the West, the belief that Chinese was a pictorial language prevailed. Such a belief led to the conjecture that Chinese came from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and even that Chinese was the Primitive or Adamic language. Inspired by these ideas, Leibniz and Bacon, among others, dreamt of inventing a Characteristica universalis modelled on Chinese. And the British John Webb, an architect by profession, published his An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language in 1669.
The 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 somehow mastered the language without any grammar texts or dictionaries. The latter became the first important sinologist. With his amazing command of the language, Ricci impressed the Chinese literati and was accepted as one of them. Another Jesuit, Nicolas Trigault produced the first system of Chinese Romanisation in 1625, in his work Xiru Ermu Zi ("Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati" 西儒耳目資).
The Spanish Dominican Francisco Varo (1627–1687) wrote the first ever Chinese grammar in any European language. His Arte de la Lengua Mandarina was published in Canton in 1703. This grammar was only sketchy, however. The first important Chinese grammar was Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare’s Notitia linguae sinicae, completed in 1729. Other important grammar texts followed, from Jean-Pierre-Abel Rémusat's Éléments de la grammaire chinoise in 1822 to Georg von der Gabelentz's Chinesische Grammatik in 1881.
Difficulty
Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to acquire for a Westerner [3]. Two major difficulties stand out:
- The number of characters: Kangxi Zidian contains 47,035 characters. However, most of the characters contained are archaic and obscure. The Xiandai Hanyu Changyòng Zibiao (现代汉语常用字表; Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese), promulgated in People’s Republic of China, lists 2,500 common characters and 1,000 less-than-common characters, while the Xiandai Hanyu Tongyong Zibiao (现代汉语通用字表; Chart of Generally Utilized Characters of Modern Chinese) lists 7,000 characters, including the 3,500 characters already listed above. Morever, most Chinese characters belong to the class of pictophonetic compounds. Still, Chinese characters pose a problem for learners of Chinese. In Gautier's novel Fortunio, a Chinese professor of the College of France, when asked by the protagonist to translate a love letter suspected to be written in Chinese, replies that the characters in the letter happen to all belong to that half of the 80,000 which he has yet to master.
The tones: Mandarin has four tones. Other Chinese dialects have more, for example, Cantonese has nine. In most Western languages, tones are only used to express emphasis or emotion, not to distinguish meanings. A Jesuit expressed his frustration in mastering the Chinese tones in a letter:
I will give you an example of their words. They told me chou 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.[4]