Learning Chinese as a Second Language (CSL): Reviewing Available Options

The number of Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) students is growing. As reported in China Daily, language experts say that over 40 million people are now studying Chinese as a second language, but next to people learning English as a Second Language, for example, this really represents very few people. Many more people know English as a Second Language (ESL) than as a native language. There are probably 900 million ESL speakers, whereas there are only 500-600 million English native language speakers. At this rate, there would need to be close to 2 billion foreigners learning Chinese, so right now Chinese is only at 2% of its potential if Chinese (CSL) were to approach English (ESL).

The Chinese Government has responded by opening Confucius Institutes. Some wonderful statistics can be cited. In 2004, a record 110,844 students from 178 countries had enrolled at Chinese universities, according to official Chinese newswire Xinhua. Reuters reported that this represented a 43% increase from 2003. In addition, more than 30 million people are currently studying Mandarin abroad, the newswire said.

Opening institutes, of course, is a wonderful idea. As is usually the case with governments, there is a lot of official work, but this misses the problem dealing with actually learning Chinese. For people whose native language is a phonetic based system rather than a character based system, learning Chinese is a big problem. . This is emphasized by the fact that more than half of those studying Chinese are those from Korea and Japan, people whose native language is a character based system. Sources said that the number of foreigners who come to China to learn Chinese has risen by 35 percent each year since 1997, and most come from Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK) and Southeast Asian countries.

If a Westerner wants to learn Chinese, he or she can best learn through a language called "pinyin". Pinyin is a phonetic system that is considered a “romanization” of the Chinese language, and most of those who study CSL begin by learning pinyin. Even Chinese youngsters learn with pinyin since Chinese characters give no hint to their pronunciation. Mass literacy was not the goal of the ancient scholars.

By teaching pinyin, students learn how to pronounce the characters. The learned pinyin characters and words can become a learning dictionary. There are some problems even with pinyin: The main disadvantage to romanization is that students often have preconceived ideas about the pronunciation of the Roman alphabet. For example, the Pinyin letter “q” has a “ch” sound, and it can take some effort to make this association.

.

When the student graduates from a workbook vocabulary list to a dictionary, more problems are encountered. Part of the problem with using a dictionary is that sooner or later (usually sooner) the CSL student runs into a word that is not in their workbook. To improve vocabulary, we use dictionaries with characters, pinyin, and the native language of the student. Pinyin dictionaries are not organized in strictly alphabetical order. They are organized by Chinese character and then by alphabetical order. Ren, the basic character for “man” is followed in my dictionary by “rencai”, a talented man and “renzhong”, an ethnic group. Following this are the listings for “ren” representing benevolence and then ren’ai and so forth. If you do not know the characters, you will have trouble using the dictionary.

There is no way to avoid learning characters if we want to learn Chinese.