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Westerners did not take up the study of the Chinese language until the 16th century. However, after 2000, more and more Westerners are learning the language, owing to commercial and cultural reasons. In 2005, 117,660 foreigners, including Westerners, take the Chinese Proficiency Test, an increase of 26.52% from 2004.[1] From 2000 to 2004, the number of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland taking Advanced Level exams in Chinese increased by 57%.[2] An independent school in the UK made Chinese one of their compulsory subjects for study in 2006.[3]
The understanding of the Chinese language in the West began with misunderstanding. Since the earliest appearance of Chinese characters in the West,[4] the belief that written Chinese was ideographic prevailed.[5] Such a belief led to Athanasius Kircher's conjecture that Chinese characters were derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some even suggested that Chinese was the Primitive or Adamic language: a Briton named 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. Inspired by such ideas, Leibniz and Bacon, among others, dreamt of inventing a characteristica universalis modelled on Chinese.[6]
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The serious 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 mastered the language without the aid of any grammar books or dictionaries, and became the first sinologists. The former set up a school in Macao, the first school for teaching foreigners Chinese, translated part of the Great Learning into Latin, the first translation of a Confucius classic in any European language, and wrote a religious tract in Chinese, the first Chinese book written by a Westerner. The latter brought Western sciences to China, and became a prolific Chinese writer. With his amazing 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 Siku Quanshu, the imperial collection of Chinese classics; some of his religious works were listed in the collection's bibliography, but not collected. Another Jesuit Nicolas Trigault produced the first system of Chinese Romanisation in a work of 1626.
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.[7] 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 Éléments de la grammaire chinoise in 1822 to Georg von der Gabelentz's Chinesische Grammatik in 1881.
While glossary for Chinese circulated among the missionaries from early on, Robert Morrison's A Dictionary of the Chinese Language was the first important Chinese dictionary for the use of Westerners.
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 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;[8]instigated by Abel-Rémusat, Wilhelm von Humboldt studied the language seriously, and discussed it in several letters with the French professor.[9]
Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn, together with Arabic, Japanese and Korean, for people whose native language is English.[10] 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".[11] Two major difficulties stand out:
Chinese courses have been blooming in the West since 2000, at every level of education.[12] 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 Confucius Institute, supervised by Hanban (汉办 abbreviated from 国家汉语国际推广领导小组办公室 Guojia Hanyu Guoji Tuiguang Lingdao Xiaozu Bangongshi) or the National Office For Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, is responsible for promoting the Chinese language in the West and other parts of the world.
For those who choose to study abroad, popular choices include the Center for Chinese Language and Cultural Studies in Taiwan and Beijing Language and Culture University in Beijing, the former was especially popular before the 1980s when Mainland China was yet to open to foreigners.