Language Log

The role of a Scotsman, John Ross (1842-1915), in creating it.  Although he was a Christian missionary who spent over half his life in China, he was apparently a gigachad.

The following video is densely packed with solid information and moves rapidly, so you have to pay close attention to follow it.

I am the proud possessor of the complete run of Mangajin (pun for "magazine") from #1-#70 (1988-1997).

Mangajin was the brainchild of Vaughan P. Simmons, whom I had conversations with at several meetings of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and corresponded with for a dozen years.  I have utmost respect for him as someone who had the vision and fortitude to make a truly effective pedagogical tool for learning Japanese a reality.

I dare say that I learned more Japanese language from Mangajin than from any other single source — just as I learned more Mandarin from Guóyǔ rìbào 國語日報 (Mandarin Daily), the Republic of China newspaper that had furigana-like bopomofo rubi phonetic annotations for all hanzi, than from any other single source.

Anh Yeo is a Chinese from Vietnam.  Currently she is studying in a graduate program of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua University.  To earn pocket money, she has taken up a job teaching Southeast Asia office workers Mandarin online.  In response to this post "Aborted character simplification in the mid-1930s" (10/5/24), which had much to do with character simplification (or not) in Singapore, she wrote to me as follows:

I had two lessons tonight teaching Pinyin. Southeast Asians learn Pinyin fast (similar alphabet + existence of tones in Thai and Vietnamese), but because of that students are reliant on Pinyin and cannot remember characters! I have students learning for 3-4 months and still have to read off Pinyin (recognizing fewer than 50 characters). I always thought the coexistence of characters and Latin alphabet in Mandarin interesting!

[This is the first of two consecutive posts on things Indian.  After reading them, if someone is prompted to send me material for a third, I'll be happy to make it a trifecta.]

Our entry point to the linguistically compelling topic of today's post is this Nikkei Asia (11/29/23) article by Barkha Shah in its "Tea Leaves" section:

Why it's worth learning ancient Sanskrit in the modern world:

India’s classical language is making a comeback via Telegram and YouTube

The author begins with a brief introduction to the language:

The language had its heyday in ancient India. The Vedas, a collection of poems and hymns, were written in Sanskrit between 1500 and 1200 B.C., along with other literary texts now known as the Upanishads, Granths and Vedangas. But while Sanskrit became the foundation for many (though not all) modern Indian languages, including Hindi, it faded away as a living tongue.

Registration is open for Artificial Intelligence in Language Education

Two years ago, during the middle of lockdown when we had to teach all of our courses via zoom, one student was conspicuously superior to all the other dozen or so students in my first-year Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC) class.  She was clearly an innately smart student, but in addition she seemed to possess a special knack for grasping the grammar, structure, and meaning of the texts we read day after day.  When it came to parsing a particularly difficult passage, she was consistently the one who could figure it out fastest and most accurately.  I had no idea to what particular talent or prior training her excellence could be attributed.

I should mention that this student was from China, as were two-thirds of the others.  Only one-third of the class were from other countries.  I should note, parenthetically, that by and large the more languages a student knows well when he or she takes LS/CC, the better she or he tends to perform in my class.  For example, one of the best students in recent years was a Mexican whose native tongue is Spanish and who is advanced in Korean.  I let him pronounce the texts in Korean.

One of my favorite books for everyday living is Irma S. Rombauer's Joy of Cooking.  The author's cheerful approach to her craft in the kitchen is similar to my jubilant upāya उपाय ("expedient pedagogical means; skill-in-means; skillful means" > fāngbiàn 方便 ["convenient"]) in the classroom.

In my classes, especially Introduction to Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC), we don't just read through texts with the aid of vocabularies, commentaries, annotations, and grammar notes.  We live the texts, act them out, draw them on the board, debate them, chant them, analyze them, get at their profound philosophical significance, plumb their esthetic depths.

The following article was published more than eleven years ago.  I do not recall being aware of it at that time.  It provides a wealth of still relevant information about the state of language affairs in the PRC — including Mandarin vs. the topolects and traditional forms of the characters vs. simplified — as well as other essential aspects of language pedagogy, such as challenging what it calls "Mandarin monoculture" and the inculcation of semi-literacy.  Since this insightful, informative essay was recently called to my attention by Jichang Lulu, I have decided to circulate it to students and colleagues via this post.

"Confucius Institutes and Controlling Chinese Languages"
Michael Churchman
The Australian National University

China Heritage Quarterly, 26 (June 2011)

And how (not) to learn Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese via Mandarin

A "Little Horatian Satire" by E. Bruce Brooks

A section of Classical Chinese Primer by E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks

The dominance of modern-Chinese based curricula may be inevitable in the present political climate, but it is objectively strange all the same. In practice, it prevents the classical language from being acquired by anyone who does not have a use for the usual prerequisite: two or three years of the modern language. The comparative philosophers and historians, the students of ancient technology, and those moved by mere intellectual and literary curiosity, are thus excluded at the outset. Is it healthy for the field, to have nobody to talk to in these neighboring disciplines? And what of the future Chinese classicists themselves, whose linguistic antennae are being tuned, by arduous toil, to a point 2,000 years later than the texts of primary interest to them?

What if the Mediterranean Classicists did as the Sinological Classicists do? An American college freshman with perfect SAT's and a burning desire to investigate the metrics of Horace walks into the Classics program advisor's office and announces her goal. She expects a welcome, and a fast-track Latin class. Instead, she gets the following:

So exclaimed a graduate student from the PRC.  She was decrying the new teaching methods for Mandarin courses in the West that do not emphasize copying characters countless times by hand and taking dictation (tīngxiě 聽寫 / 听写) tests, but rather relying on Pinyin (alphabetical) inputting to write the characters via computers.

These are topics we have discussed numerous times on Language Log (see "Selected readings" below for a sample of some of the posts that touch on this subject.  I told the student that this is indeed a fact of life, and that current teaching methods for Mandarin emphasize pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, etc., and that handwriting the characters is no longer a priority.  Whereas in the past handwriting of the characters used to take up over half of a student's learning time, now copying characters is reduced to only a small fraction of that.

Valerie Hansen is Director of Undergraduate Studies for East Asian Studies at Yale.  Yesterday she was talking to a sophomore who had taken 1st and 2nd year Mandarin online and is about to start 3rd year.  Valerie writes:

After a while, she told me that she did have one worry about taking 3rd year: she had never written a single character and she wondered if her teacher would expect her to know how to write characters.

Article by Colm Keena in The Irish Times (8/2/21):

"Decision on Mandarin Leaving Cert exam ‘outrages’ Chinese communities:
Exam subject that students can sit from 2022 will only allow for simplified Chinese script"

Here are the first four paragraphs of the article:

After reading "Bad poetry, bad translation" (6/18/21), Zihan Guo wrote:

Thank you for sharing this post.

While reading it, its comments, and all the selected readings related to it, I could not help but feel that translating classical Chinese poetry is the way to make sure one really understands it. Back in middle school and high school in China, my teachers would teach poetry and prose through paraphrasing, making them coherent narratives. However, adding things is as detrimental as its opposite. It was not until college that I started to truly appreciate classical Chinese poetry, through producing English translations myself, struggling with its syntactic concision and lack of precision, squeezing meanings from diction and speculating moods from imagery.