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ALTHOUGH China and the United States seem very different at first sight, they are curiously similar in some ways. Both are large countries with diverse and multiethnic populations. What interests me, however, is the degree to which they are both stubbornly monolingual. Although the two countries have sizable communities that speak foreign languages, China and the United States have a strong ingrained resistance to learning the languages of other peoples and countries. Like the United States, China tends to assimilate newcomers linguistically: a long series of non-Han conquerors—Xianbei, Mongols, and Manchus—have been completely sinicized, as have innumerable tribal groups in the south. There is an old anecdote that illustrates the Chinese view of foreign languages. A missionary proficient in Chinese paid a visit to the countryside. There he met an old peasant lady and spoke to her for fifteen or twenty minutes. On her way home the old lady ran into the local school-master and said to him, “Who says it is difficult to learn the language of the foreign devils? I just ran into one of them and understood every word he said.” I always thought this story, while humorous, was surely apocryphal. But last summer, when my wife and I were in a small town in the mountains of Fujian province, something very similar happened to me. One evening we were standing in front of the hostel where we were staying, talking to a local functionary. Not far away there was a young Chinese couple with their seven- or eight-year-old son. After I had spoken for a while in Chinese, the little boy said to his father, “Wo faxian wo ye dong laowai de hua” ‘Daddy, I've discovered that I understand the foreigner's language too.’ Doesn't this incident betray an underlying suspicion (shared by many Americans) that there are really no foreign languages? If only those foreigners weren't so stubborn and would speak to us properly, we would understand them. A related attitude is that it is probably not worth investing years of effort to master a foreign language; somehow there will always be foreigners who will understand us. When I go to China I rarely meet people adequate fluent in English, even though English is taught in most schools there now. It is hard to imagine anyone, wether a businessperson, journalist, student, missionary, or teacher, being able to function in China without a good basic command of the language. Anyone who decides to work, teach, or do research in China will certainly have to devote several years to mastering Chinese. Given China's enormous population, its geopolitical importance, and its exploding economy, there is every reason to think that the United States will need a much larger cadre of fluent Chinese speakers in the years to come.
If we in the United States are going to learn Chinese, we first have to be clear about what it is. The term Chinese is ambiguous. In common usage, it can refer to any historical stage of the language, from the earliest written records in the seventeenth century BC to today's issue of the People's Daily . It can refer to either classical Chinese or modern vernacular Chinese, and it can refer to any of the myriad dialects spoken across the vast expanse of China. Nowadays in its most common usage Chinese refers to the modern standard language, which came into being only in this century. This modern standard developed out of an earlier bureaucratic lingua franca called guanhua , literally ‘the language of the officials.’ Since Chinese officials in premodern China were referred to by the somewhat exotic term Mandarin (a word apparently of Sanskrit origin), this loosely codified bureaucratic language came to be known as the language of the Mandarins or simply Mandarin. In the nineteenth century Mandarin was used by government officials, merchants, and others who had occasion to travel around the country. At the local level, however, regional dialects were the chief vehicles of communication. Some of these dialects are for all practical purposes different languages, totally unintelligible to people from other parts of China. A person who speaks only Beijing dialect, for example, can no more understand a person speaking Xiamen dialect than a Scotsman can understand someone speaking Swiss German. In the twentieth century many came to see the necessity for a more strictly codified national language comparable to the national languages of Europe and the Americas. Mandarin became the basis of this new national standard, but whereas traditional Mandarin had taken a dialect of the Nanjing region as its standard for pronunciation, it was decided in the 1920s to adopt Beijing pronunciation as the norm. Along with a new standard pronunciation, thousands of new words, most of them denoting Western things and ideas, were introduced. The communist revolution in the late 1940s inundated the language with Marxist terminology. The result is a strongly Westernized form of Chinese that would scarcely be intelligible to a person from the nineteenth century. It is this language that I refer to as Modern Chinese or simply Chinese. For some reason, however, the quaint term Mandarin has persisted even though it has no basis in Chinese itself, since no one in China refers to the standard language as guanhua any longer. A few years ago the head of our advising office called to ask me why we didn't call our Chinese courses Mandarin. My reply was that we teach the standard language of China, and I don't see any reason to call that language anything but Chinese. The reason he called was that he is often asked whether our Chinese courses are Mandarin or Cantonese. This confusion is rooted in a peculiarly American situation. Almost all the early Chinese immigrants to the United States were from the Cantonese dialect area in southeastern China. Various Cantonese dialects predominate in the Chinatowns of several large American cities. It was only after the Second World War that significant numbers of speakers of standard Chinese began to appear in this country. Therefore many Americans have the impression that Cantonese is spoken very widely in China when in fact it is restricted to two provinces in the far south. I have advocated abandoning the term Mandarin altogether as a designation of the national standard language but have not met with overwhelming success. One continues to see articles in learned journals about some aspect of Mandarin pronunciation or Mandarin Chinese syntax. Restaurants even advertise Mandarin food, which seems to mean (as far as I can determine) non-Cantonese food. I often point out that the standard language of Italy is called Italian, the standard language of France is called French, and the standard language of Poland is called Polish, so why can't the standard language of China be called Chinese?
Nowadays the standard language is taught everywhere in Chinese schools; a traveler can use it throughout China and encounter little difficulty. Regional dialects survive and even thrive in some areas, but almost everyone under sixty can speak at least a modicum of the standard language. There is no doubt that the standard language is the form of Chinese of foreigner should learn. As China's economy grows and prospers, certain regional dialects may become very important; in several economic centers—Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Xiamen, Taibei—dialectal forms of Chinese predominate or at least are widely used in commercial life. But in all these places the standard language is also spoken and widely used.
Chinese in one form or another is spoken by over one billion people. The present population of China is 1.2 billion. About seven percent of these are non-Han minorities—Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongols, Yipos, Zhuangs—many of whom speak their native languages and Chinese; some minority groups have even switched to Chinese altogether. Dialect speakers are increasingly becoming proficient in the Beijing-based standard. In some regions local dialects are even beginning to disappear. Outside China proper, Chinese has official status in Taiwan and Singapore, and it is widely spoken in several Southeast Asian countries. It is clearly one of the five or six great world languages, and it seems bound to remain so indefinitely.
Undoubtedly the most remarkable thing about Chinese to non-Asians is the way it is written. Written Chinese has an unbroken history of almost four thousand years. although radical thinkers in the 1930s and 1940s looked forward to the abolition of the traditional writing system, which they viewed as a reactionary impediment to modernization, there is little indication that the traditional script will be abandoned. Several plans to romanize Chinese in the past scarcely got off the ground. Chinese characters are such powerful symbols of Chinese cultural identity that it is hard to imagine what would motivate China to give them up. And to make matters even more complicated, the mainland regime has drastically simplified its script while people in Hong Kong and Taiwan continue to use the traditional, more complex script forms.
So what does the person who wants to learn Chinese in the 1990s face? The good news is that the campaign to establish a single standard language for the entire country has by and large succeeded. Only a few people, such as linguists and anthropologists who want to do fieldwork in rural areas, will need to learn local dialects, but even they will almost surely learn the standard language first. In the future some may wish to learn the dialects of great commercial centers like Shanghai and Guangzhou. The standard language, as it has spread throughout the country, has developed distinct local variations, but they are generally not a serious barrier to communication.
The bad news is what Chinese is still written in Chinese characters. How large a problem is this? First of all we need to know how many Chinese characters there are. The literal answer to this question is rather intimidating. An eleventh-century rhyme dictionary, the Jiyun , contains 53,525 characters. The great Kangxi Dictionary , published in 1710 and used by several generations of Western sinologists, contains 47,033 characters. A recent compendium, the Hanyu da zidian, contains over 60,000 characters. You might well ask, “Could anyone learn so many characters?” The answer, fortunately, is “certainly not.” Several modern studies have shown that the average educated Chinese person commands somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 characters. Specialists in certain areas of classical literature, Chinese history, and philology may know a couple thousand more. I think a good ballpark figure how many Chinese characters one has to know to be literate in Modern Chinese is around 3,500. What are all the other characters found in the great compendia mentioned above? Many are simply graphic variants of the same word. Others are obscure words culled from classical literature. Some occur only in rare proper names. Finally, some simply get from one dictionary to another without anyone really knowing where they came from.
The task confronting the student of Chinese has two rather distinct aspects. First he or she must learn speaking and listening skills; for this study, a romanized form of the language is used. In the past century and a half there have been several competing romanization systems, mostly devised by non-Chinese. In 1957 the Chinese government promulgated its own official system, called pinyin, which the Chinese began to use in dictionaries and in various kinds of reference works. It is also used to teach children correct pronunciation in primary school. The most interesting thing is that no books, magazines, or newspaper are published in it, so for all practical purposes Chinese characters remain the sole system for writing Chinese. Pinyin has gradually replaced the other romanizations devised by foreigners, and almost all the textbooks used currently in the United States employ the pinyin system. It has also been widely by journalists and scholars.
Acquiring a basic command of everyday spoken Chinese does not seem to be overwhelmingly difficult. The chief difficulty perhaps is that Chinese is a tonal language, which means that changes in convey differences in lexical meaning. To demonstrate this phenomenon, I have devised the sentence “You! You you you le” which means, “Oh, there is oil (or gasoline) again!” You spoken in a high level tone is an interjection expressing surprise; you spoken with a tonal contour that begins high and falls sharply means “again”; you with a low falling tone means “there is”; and you pronounced with a sharply rising tone means “oil” or “gasoline.” Le is a sentence final particle indicating that a new state of affairs has come about; this particle and all other such particles are toneless. This short sentence also illustrates several other things about Chinese: adverbs must come right before the verb; objects follow the verb; verbs and nouns are invariable—they have no endings for things like gender, number, case, tense, or mood; and many grammatical relations are shown by particles placed at the end of the sentence. In fact, virtually the only grammatical mechanisms in Chinese are word order and the use of particles. This fact makes speaking Chinese sound very simple, but in practice it isn't. William Moulton, from Princeton, once told me that when he was in Holland, he met a renowned Dutch sinologist who assured him that Chinese has no grammar. “In that case,” Moulton replied, “When you speak Chinese you can't make a mistake.” Well, anyone who has tried to learn Chinese knows that it is just as easy to make an error in Chinese as in any other language. But despite certain challenges in pronunciation and structure, spoken Chinese is not inordinately difficult, and experience over half a century of teaching Chinese to Americans has shown that a person can attain spoken proficiency in a relatively short period.
Learning the written language requires time, but it is easy to exaggerate the difficulties. Good students are frequently able to tackle newspapers and short stories after two or two-and-a-half years of the language. Apart from the characters themselves, there are other aspects of the written language that make it hard to master. Until the beginning of this century almost everything was written in classical, or literary, Chinese: only certain kinds of popular literature were written in the vernacular. Literary Chinese was based on the language of the classical period, which lasted roughly from the sixth century BC to about the third century AD. This language was vastly different from the everyday language of ordinary people. It differed mainly in its lexicon, but there were also important structural differences. Only in the 1920s and 1930s was a transition made from literary Chinese to the modern written language based on the vernacular. But in a sense the transition was never completed. Present-day written Chinese still retains a significant substratum from the former literary medium, so current written and spoken Chinese are not totally uniform. To some extent every important modern language has such a gap, but the gap is considerably wider in Chinese than it is in English, for example. Since the modern language in a sense is still in the shadow of the old literary language and since many educated Chinese still study and can appreciate literature written in classical Chinese, a student who wishes to attain full proficiency in modern written Chinese will at some point have to study a couple of years of the classical language. How long does it take to develop a good, functional knowledge of both spoken and written Chinese? Judging from my own experience and that of colleagues, I would say that mastering Chinese is an undertaking of six or seven years, including, normally, a year or two of study in China.
Now let us look at some of the practical problems one encounters in learning Chinese. How accessible is instruction in Chinese? Chinese is now taught at most major universities, many of which offer undergraduate majors and graduate degrees in Chinese. A growing number of liberal arts colleges offer at least beginning and intermediate Chinese, and Chinese instruction is spreading into community colleges and secondary schools. Enrollment has been rising in recent years. At the University of Washington as many students now take Chinese as take Japanese. In fall 1994 we had almost 200 students in beginning courses. At the second-year level we had three sections with 60 to 75 students. At the third-year level we had two sections with 30 to 50 students. All indications are that these figures will continue to rise modestly for the next few years.
Textbook production has not kept up with the increasing popularity of Chinese as a foreign language. Before the 1940s there were scarcely any usable texts; most of the existing ones were written in China for training missionaries or people engaged in commerce. The Second World War gave an enormous boost to the production of modern language teaching material. The old Department of War engaged some of the nation's best linguists to write new texts designed to teach a practical knowledge of a host of uncommonly taught languages. The Chinese text was compiled under the direction of Charles Hockett, who subsequently became one of the most famous linguist in the United States. In addition to a basic textbook, Hockett compiled an excellent dictionary of spoken Chinese, which is still useful. On the basis of these materials, the Institute of Far Eastern Languages at Yale University turned out a series of high-quality, up-to-date teaching materials for both spoken and written Chinese that were the mainstays of Chinese language instruction in the United States well into the 1960s and 1970s. Students of my age group were almost all brought up on these materials. In fact, in my classes I used Speak Chinese , the basic beginning text for spoken Chinese, until the mid-1970s. The opening of China to Americans in the early 1970s, as a result of Nixon's historic visit to China, changed things radically. Until that time China had been like the other side of the moon; we had little reliable information about what was going on there, and we were almost totally ignorant about the development of the spoken language since the inauguration of the communist regime in 1949. In the mid-1970s, texts produced in China began to become available. Although these texts were filled with political rhetoric and reflected a way of life that our students were unfamiliar with, many of us felt that the texts represented Chinese as it was used in China and that consequently we should be teaching them. A gradual shift to mainland materials took place. There were many problems with these texts. The contents were unfamiliar not only to students but to many teachers as well. They did not come with any usable audiotapes or other instructional aids. Their use required the compilation of extensive supplementary materials. In the late 1970s, just a most people in the field were ready to give up, a second generation of textbooks began to appear. The contents of these newer texts were not so unrelentingly political, and some improvements had been made in the presentation of the material. These second-generation materials are still widely used. What still lack are materials produced commercially in the United States, incorporating up-to-date ideas about language teaching and accompanied by modern audiovisual backup material. Our materials remain uninteresting both in appearance and content.
Dictionaries are essential in foreign language learning. Only in the late 1970s did we get an adequate modern Chinese-English dictionary that realistically reflected mainland Chinese usage. (It has always amazed me that, although millions of dollars were spent on the study of Russian and Chinese during the cold war, neither a comprehensive Russian-English dictionary nor a comprehensive Chinese-English dictionary was ever compiled in this country.) Surprisingly, this dictionary has not been updated since, nor have any other large-scale dictionaries appeared. Apparently not enough students are enrolled in Chinese language courses to tempt American textbook publishers to invest in the creation of some really contemporary and exciting teaching materials. Materials in use are minimally adequate; many teachers are making good use of them, and students are learning from them, but I think all of us in Chinese long for something better.
To learn Chinese efficiently one needs a good teacher, and hence an important consideration is the training of the next generation of Chinese language teachers. In the past, graduate programs in Chinese language and literature have had a distinctly classical bent. Typically after two or three years of Modern Chinese, one's attention is directed to the vast wealth of classical literature. One spends years learning the intricacies of sinological bibliography and research methods and finally writes a dissertation on an ancient text or literary figure. This orientation has roots in nineteenth-century Europe, where sinology was closely modeled on classical studies. Although I am a product of that tradition of Chinese studies, which has produced many fine teachers, I question whether it produces the kind of teacher that is needed in the 1990s. I do not advocate abandoning this venerable approach, just a I would not advocate abandoning the Western classics, but I do not think that it has to be the universal model. As I said earlier, the word Chinese refers to many different things, including both classical Chinese and the modern language. Suppose for a moment that the classical language were called something like “Hanese” and Chinese were reserved for the modern language. I believe that Modern Chinese would then be an autonomous field, just as Italian is a separate field from Latin. This separation would be healthy. At present, aside from an occasional seminar on Modern Chinese literature, there is not much advanced training offered in the modern language. If a nonnative speaker learns the modern language well, it is most often because he or she has done so independently, typically by spending several years in China. But even then that person has probably developed only a good practical knowledge of the language and probably still lacks what we might call a fully professional command of it. Although what many institutions need when they hire a person to each Chinese is an expert on the modern language, what they often get is an expert on some aspect of premodern China with a more or less adequate command of the modern language. We need at least a few programs in the United States that concentrate on graduating people with a thoroughly professional knowledge of Modern Chinese.
Many graduate students in Chinese language and literature believe that most schools teaching Chinese want faculty members who can teach a level or two of Modern Chinese and a course or two on Chinese culture or literature in translation. Graduates who had contemplated teaching Tang poetry or historical phonology find this emphasis somewhat of a letdown. But even more serious, they have not been professionally prepared to do what is required. I will forego the temptation to design an ideal program for preparing a good Chinese teacher, but I will say that most programs need a more contemporary emphasis. Students should spend at least one year, preferably two or more, studying and doing research in China. Every graduate student should have an opportunity to teach a language course and if possible a survey course on Chinese culture, language, or literature in translation. A course on language pedagogy should probably be required of every student. There is of course a danger in this approach: we might turn our graduate courses of study into purely utilitarian training programs and begin to slight the more academic and intellectually rewarding aspects of the field. At present, I think there is little danger of that.
China is not so much a country as it is an entire civilization. The cultures of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are profoundly influenced by Chinese ideas and institutions; in East Asia China's cultural role is a bit like that of Greece in European civilization. The West knew scarcely anything about this great country until reports began to trickle back from the first Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century. Since that time the western world has gone through several cycles of enthusiasm for and disappointment with China. One can still frequently discern a kind of romanticism in writing about China, a tendency to treat China and things Chinese as exotic and distant from our own concerns. The Chinese are different from us, but so are French and the Arabs. In our profession languages like Chinese and Arabic used to be referred to as “exotic languages”; this designation has been replaced by the less ethnocentric one “less commonly taught languages.” But this term is also somewhat ethnocentric: less commonly taught where? Certainly not in China or in the Arabic-speaking world. What we really mean, I suppose, is “non-Western” or “non-European.” Sometimes calls for the wider teaching of Chinese are viewed as a threat to the hegemony of European language teaching, especially in the undergraduate curriculum. I do not see much of threat. Chinese-language enrollments will probably rise modestly over the next decade, but this increase will mostly be due to the larger numbers of students of Asian ancestry; a person whose parents or grand-parents came from China will naturally think of Chinese when contemplating how to fulfill a foreign language requirement. I also hope that a few people will view the learning of Chinese as an opportunity to learn more about themselves, even if they have no Chinese ancestors. I have on occasion advised my own students in Chinese to study another Asian language—Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Korean—not merely because it will give them an insight into another language and culture but because it will help them see Chinese from a different perspective. Similarly, I believe that, beyond the many practical benefits, the study of Chinese might help a lot Americans expand their intellectual horizons, and as they develop a better understanding of China, they may also begin to see their own culture in a clearer light.
The author is Professor of Chinese at the University of Washington. This article was originally presented as the keynote address at ADFL Seminar West, 22—24 June 1995, in Eugene, Oregon.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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