After more than two years of studying Chinese at Columbia, says Mirsky, “I could say almost nothing.” ©John Downing/Rex
Just before leaving China in December last year, David Cameron set British children a daunting task: “I want Britain linked up to the world’s fast-growing economies. And that includes our young people learning the languages to seal tomorrow’s business deals… China is set to be the world’s largest economy. So it’s time to look beyond the traditional focus on French and German and get many more children learning Mandarin.”
Daunting indeed. Only 3,000 pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland took written Chinese GCSEs in 2013, compared with 177,000 taking GCSEs in French and 62,000 in German. But Chinese is the fourth most popular language at A-Level. And in the US, about 60,000 school children are learning it.
Like most officials (and journalists, for that matter), Cameron seems not to know that “Mandarin” is a dialect, spoken across northern China. Nor does he acknowledge that most business transactions between Chinese and westerners are conducted in English.
Several centuries ago, foreign missionaries noticed that no matter where officials came from in China, they learned this dialect in order to communicate with each other and with those above them. These missionaries used the word “Mandarin,” meaning “to rule,” to describe this form of speech. Today, on the Chinese mainland, where everyone learns to speak this language, it is called Putonghua, “ordinary speech.” In Taiwan, it is called Guoyu, “national speech.” But all Chinese, wherever they are from, read the same characters, even if they pronounce them differently.
So can a foreigner really learn Chinese? One of the six official languages at the UN, Chinese is among the toughest, rivalled in difficulty only by Arabic and one or two others. This is because reading it is uniquely challenging. One cannot guess the meaning or pronunciation of a new character as one can with a new word in an alphabetical language. With a new Chinese character both meaning and pronunciation must be memorised—and there are many thousands of characters. That is why in schools in China children first learn to read “pinyin,” an alphabetical form of Chinese. A further complication is that on the mainland, but not in Taiwan, characters are now taught in a “simplified” form introduced in 1955. The simple versions sometimes resemble the traditional ones, but many simplified forms are original. And on the mainland, students have for many years learned only the simple forms. They are no longer cut off from the great traditional literature as a consequence, however, since much of it now can be read in simplified characters.
What makes the Chinese language interesting and worth learning in its classical form is its poetry, and works of history. I have on my wall a scroll written for me in Taiwan in the late 1950s by Dong Zuobin, who, 30 years earlier, was one of the first scholars to decipher the writing cut into the “oracle bones” from oxen and turtles; dating to about 1500 BC, this was the first written Chinese. On the scroll, Dong wrote an 8th-century poem by the great Tang poet Du Fu in both the most ancient language and in modern (though not simplified) characters. Some of the oracle bone characters, like the one for dragon, look like pictures. There were also not enough of them to write down the Tang poem, so in the ancient version the poem is rather shorter. The poems of the Tang Dynasty (which lasted from 618 to 906 AD) are very fine, and if one reads them in Cantonese, which is more like ancient spoken Chinese than Mandarin, they sound like songs.
On another wall, I have a painting by Liang Kai (c. 1140-1210) which shows the Tang poet Li Bo. He is composing one of his most famous poems, about being drunk, standing on tiptoe and gazing up at the moon. The late 18th-century Emperor, Qian Long, a connoisseur, placed his large and handsome red seal in the top right hand corner, which in China is deemed to add to its beauty.
Everyone knows there are Chinese “tones.” In spoken Mandarin there are four of them. Depending on how a word is pronounced they are phonemic—that is, the meaning of the spoken word changes with the sound. This is not significant when reading, because all characters look different from each other. Thus, the spoken word “ma,” depending on tone, can mean mother, hemp, horse or curse. This sounds like linguistic disaster to beginning foreign students. But it isn’t. Getting a tone wrong is not that different from not distinguishing between “bed” and “bad” in English—it marks out a “bad accent,” but there is little misunderstanding. If I referred to my mother in a sentence as “horse,” a Chinese might smile inwardly but would know what I meant.
Most speakers of a second language—including me in Chinese— regularly make little or big mistakes. I have met perhaps three foreigners who speak Chinese perfectly, the American academic Perry Link being the best of them. If a foreigner like Link speaks Chinese and a listening native speaker does not compliment him on his command of the language, you know it’s perfect.
Do you need to speak Chinese in order to understand China? It depends. If you want to know what Chinese outside the main cities are thinking or feeling, especially farmers, the language is essential. But if you’re interested in Chinese politics or foreign policy, then read the Chinese press in translation and interview welleducated urban Chinese, especially officials, in English, and you can understand a great deal. The outstanding recent example of this is the journalist Jonathan Fenby, whose book Will China Dominate the 21st Century? is the perfect antidote to When China Rules the World by Martin Jacques, the former editor of Marxism Today, who also knows no Chinese but falls at every hurdle when discussing China today.
What about authors who read Chinese but cannot speak it? When I was learning Chinese in the 1950s, most of the professors at the main universities on both sides of the Atlantic could read the language but, as I realised years later, they couldn’t speak it with anything approaching fluency. They were often distinguished scholars, however, and we still read their monographs today. Then there was Arthur Waley (1889-1966), the unrivalled translator of traditional Chinese and Japanese literature, who never learned to speak either Chinese or Japanese. I was once sitting with him in the sun outside King’s College chapel. It was the summer of 1961 and I was teaching spoken Chinese at Cambridge. He told me he envied my ability to speak it. I dared to ask the great man why he had never learned to speak the languages he translated. He replied that years before he was flying to Hong Kong, determined to go on to China and learn to speak Chinese. But he left the plane in Honolulu and flew back to England. When I shyly asked him why, Waley replied, “I was afraid I would be disappointed.”
For those who want to begin learning Chinese today, there is an apparently promising new book, Chineasy: The New Way To Read Chinese by Shao Lan (Thames & Hudson, £12.95). A Taiwanese, she wants learning to read Chinese to be easy and, as she says several times, “fun.” Shao Lan writes that she wants to “meld” east and west, but that in the way lies a “giant roadblock... the Great Wall of Chinese,” which has been “torture” for her British-born children. She spent years looking for a “fun and easy way to teach them how to read Chinese.” After years of searching, she devised Chineasy. “And you know what? It works.”
The goal, Shao Lan explains, is to get students to read “Chinese easily by recognising characters through simple illustrations.” Students learn a few hundred characters on the basis of which they are able to go on to acquire new characters and phrases. According to Shao Lan, this requires “very little effort.” After learning a few hundred characters, based on the large and attractively drawn ones in Chineasy, a student can understand “basic Chinese literature” and begin to “delve into Chinese culture and art.” However, she plainly doesn’t believe this herself. The first piece of reading, after the fun, is “Peter and the Wolf.”
All Chinese characters include a component called a “radical.” The presence of a particular radical sometimes points to the meaning of the character, and allows them to be grouped in dictionaries. Chineasy does the same, with fewer of what Shao Lan calls “building blocks.” Thus the “building block” for fire, “huo,” (which is also a traditional radical) can transmute into the twocharacter “yanyan,” a blazing fire. How a student is supposed to learn the pronunciation and meaning of “yanyan,” except by memorising—perhaps not such “fun”—she doesn’t say.
Almost in passing, Shao Lan notes that students of Chineasy learn “traditional Chinese,” by which presumably she means, though she doesn’t say this explicitly, traditional Chinese characters. She does admit, however, that it is only in Taiwan and Hong Kong that students study characters in the traditional, rather than the simplified, form. Students who learn only simplified characters cannot decipher traditional ones. I should add that there are some embarrassing mistakes in Chineasy. Shao Lan’s translations are often wrong. “Shao,” for example, doesn’t mean “little.” It means “few.” Nor does “de” mean “from.” It is a common possessive, as in “wodeshu, “my book”. Nor does she anywhere explain the grammar of Chinese, namely how to read a sentence or write one.
Reading the introduction to Chineasy, I felt a stab of déjà vu. The “fun” method was familiar. In 1955, when I set out to learn Chinese in the East Asia Department of Columbia University (in those days one of a handful of places where it was possible to learn Chinese), we learned to read and write characters, one by one, then by ten and finally, after a few months, a few hundred. We grouped them by radical. We learned only to pronounce them— although our teachers were Chinese, the classes were conducted in English. After a few months I was memorising 20 new characters every night. During the day I attended lectures in English on Chinese history, philosophy and art.
After more than two years at Columbia, I had learned several thousand characters, which I pronounced clumsily, and began my research on the Tang dynasty. I made my way slowly through ancient texts, jumping up every five minutes to ask Mr Lu, one of the Chinese librarians, the meaning of a word or phrase. When I arrived in Taiwan in 1958, for a stay of four years, I could say almost nothing in Chinese, which baffled the nice immigration officer when I landed. After two years I became the co-director of the Chinese school for American students of Chinese history, politics, anthropology, and literature. They continued their research, but spent several hours daily with Chinese teachers learning how to speak Chinese.
The oddest thing about Chineasy is that it is so out of date. No one teaches Chinese characters first anymore. As with our own native languages, pupils are taught to speak first. In 1961, after leaving Taiwan able to speak Chinese, I was asked to teach the first course ever in spoken Chinese to students at Cambridge, Oxford and the University of London. Most of the students had already learned to read literary Chinese to a moderate standard. The professors at the three institutions could not speak Chinese, and one of them objected to the course, saying the students could go to China later in their studies.
By 1965, I was a contributor to a Yale University series on Chinese directed by the sinologist John DeFrancis. The guiding principle of the series, which went from beginning to advanced in six volumes, was that the students learned to read characters for words and sentences they had already learned to speak, helped greatly by listening to tapes. In the early 70s, I spent a year at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London where one day I was confronted by an angry student who asked me, in an impressive Irish accent, if I was one of the authors of DeFrancis. I said I was and she said it was “crap.” Nothing is explained, she said, and we just go round and round the class reading out sentences—the way I had been taught at Columbia in 1955. The professor teaching the course couldn’t speak Chinese and was using the DeFrancis Reader, which assumed knowledge of speaking first and was otherwise useless. Like Shao Lan and David Cameron, he had no notion of how to really learn Chinese—that is, to do it the way they learned their own first languages and speak first. To the dismay of that professor at SOAS, I spent a few hours weekly teaching his students how to speak. We never reached “Peter and the Wolf.”
