Talk:Chinese as a foreign language

message: I wonder if the scope of this should perhaps be broadened, since Westerners aren't the only non-Chinese people who study/have studied Chinese.  Perhaps Chinese language learning and teaching, along the lines of the English language learning and teaching article?  Or Chinese as an additional language? -- Visviva 04:04, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I thought of that indeed, but I supposed then the scope would be too big... considering the Japanese and the Korean and the Vietnamese...--K.C. Tang 05:48, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: moreover, the diffculties, say, a French faces, is different from those, say, a Japanese face, in learning Chinese.--K.C. Tang 07:27, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "Chinese as a foreign or second language" sounds really cumbersome and awkward. Certainly no one will search for that exact page title. Chinese language learning and teaching is better. Heroeswithmetaphors (talk) 09:48, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not the same as learning a language natively and the title is the same as for English.--PaulMSanders (talk) 14:26, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: An English UK term is TEFL or TEF2L - Teaching English as a Foreign (or Second) Language. The US term is Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages TESOL. The fact is that there are many bilingual people in the Americas who have both Spanish and English and on the Indian subcontinent and in most of Africa (and most of the world) being bilingual or trilingual is the norm rather than the exception. So why a SECOND language? It is quite typical for people to start learning Chinese as a third or fourth language. RPSM (talk) 13:38, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: "Second language" is a generic term covering a non-native language that is learned starting [usually] in adulthood or adolescence. rʨanaɢ (talk) 17:14, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: As per the below comment that "Chinese" does not only refer to "Mandarin Chinese", how about Mandarin Chinese language education? Obviously the article would still mainly discuss non-native learners, but we could even include a small section on how the language is taught to native speakers in China.  Heroeswithmetaphors (talk) 17:42, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Page title

message: Btw, in November or December 2017, Duolingo started offering Mandarin Chinese. I suggest that be mentioned in this article. (I started studying Chinese on Duolingo almost immediately after it was first offered.)--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 05:39, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I think a section on app-based and web-based learning would be appropriate, but it shouldn’t focus on Duolingo. Many other apps have been offering Chinese for years, including Mango Languages, Memrise and Skritter to name just three. Phlar (talk) 11:07, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point. A section on language apps could mention Duolingo, but other apps should of course be mentioned as well.--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 02:50, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Duolingo

message: I fail to see why only "Western" speakers should be included on this list.  There is no reason why Japanese, Vietnamese, Indians etc who learn the language should be excluded.  Excluding them is pointless and petty.  If you are concerned that the list will get too long, remember that I am only including notable speakers.  Will provide citations in due course, although in most cases their fluency is listed on their linked Wikipedia biographical articles. Kransky (talk) 02:21, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This article is about the Western study of the Chinese language. So you see the delimitation... Cheers.--K.C. Tang (talk) 01:26, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: hmmmm...then is there any reason why this article couldn't be expanded to represent a worldwide view?
Kransky (talk) 09:28, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I tried to explain this at the first post of this discussion page. The scope is so big. Perhaps a more competent editor can try to encompass the whole thing. Cheers.--K.C. Tang (talk) 14:02, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: My response would be (a) including a world wide view wouldn't really take up too much space, (b) it is rather facile and unsophisticated to divide the world into 'Western' and 'non-Western' and expect there to be differences between the groups, or similarities within each group (the Japanese, Korean and Chinese share similar vocab, but grammatical structures and writing is different).  Kransky (talk) 14:52, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Instead of renaming and reorganizing the current article, one can start Chinese as a foreign language (or something like that) and then link to the current article as a branch article (). It'd be simpler. I mean as long as one has the relevant information, not just creating the page for its own sake. I think anything goes on Wikiepdia, as long as one has done their research and has some useful information to share. Cheers.--K.C. Tang (talk) 02:06, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: By the way, the non-native speakers list should be put in the article suggested above, since non-Western people are included therein. Regards.--K.C. Tang (talk) 02:57, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

text: Chinese as a foreign language sounds like a good idea, like Swedish as a foreign language and English language learning and teaching.  However it would be more logical to have the content of Western study of the Chinese language incorporated in Chinese as a foreign language, than exist as a separate article.  Frankly I do not see why the "Western" and "non-Western" learning of Chinese should be treated differently - nor do other people for other articles that might invite ideas that differences exist.Kransky (talk) 06:12, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The reason is that there're articles particularly devoted to the topic of the Western study of Chinese (as cited in the current article, see Notes). So I guess the Western study of Chinese is a legitimate topic of a Wikipedia article, and it's reasonable to have it exist as a separate article. In any case, the non-native speakers list should not exist in an article entitled "Western ...", as title and content should match each other. So one should either rewrite and rename the article, or put the list in a new article as suggested above. As I said above, anything goes, as long as research is done and useful information is provided. I'd only be glad to see editors more competent than myself improve the article. :)--K.C. Tang (talk) 09:18, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

text: Then I suggest the article gets renamed to Chinese as a foreign language; in time contributors will add discussion about the teaching of Chinese to "non-Westerners".  Kransky (talk) 11:30, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Non-native speakers of Chinese

message: Could someone please translate or have translated the non-English quotes on this page? This is the English Wikipedia and if anyone wanted to find out more about Chinese as a foreign language but doesn't speak French or German, those quotes are completely useless. --Joowwww (talk) 23:00, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Foreign language quotes 

message: I'm curious why the "See also" section includes Japanese. Apart from the fact that they're major Oriental languages and both use Chinese characters, it's hard to see why Japanese should automatically be listed in an article about Chinese (unlike, say, "Arabic as a foreign language", etc.)
Bathrobe (talk) 01:26, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Completely agreed. I made the same comment on the discussion for Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi. I'm in favor of having this link removed. Simplylala (talk) 13:27, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: See also.... Japanese?

message: In brief, another serious difficulty from the commonly mentioned hanzi and tones, I find understanding spoken Chinese. I am pretty comfortable with initials/finals and tones but find extremely difficult to understand unknown texts/dialogues. Words are too short and there's a lot of similarity between similar syllables. You need to understand the context very well. --Atitarev (talk) 09:50, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Spoken Chinese is much clearer than any other languages since it's generally slower. Because one character corresponds to one syllable and that syllable often has the meaning of a whole word. A study has found out that no matter how fast a language is spoken, the amount of information conveyed is nearly the same. So Spanish is much faster and than English, but Spanish doesn't contain more meaning. Chinese is slower, but contains more content. What you find difficult is irrelevant to the article. If you learned another foreign language, your listening skills would probably be even worse. --2.245.213.216 (talk) 22:52, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another difficulty 

message: The examples given in the Massive amount of homophones are inane. Words like "míng/ mǐng" are not homophones, they have different tones. Chinese does have plenty of true homophony (for example, the pronunciation shì corresponds to at least 30 different words), and having anglocentric examples like this is embarrassing. Is anyone watching this page and interested in cleaning up this section? If not, I'll add it to my to-do list. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 14:51, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I had the same first reaction to "míng/ mǐng", but I then clicked on one of them.  When I clicked on míng, for example, I got a list of characters all pronounced as míng, implying that these are homophones.  This fails to make the point in a different way, though.  Many of the characters are bounded forms, meaning that they can't be used on their own as a word.  For example, míng (茗) means tea, but you can't ask for some míng.  Instead the character or syllable is used in longer words and indicates tea within them.  This is similar to the English syllable "ped", which can refer to both children and feet but does not stand alone as a word.  It's not a homophone because the whole words that happen to include "ped" are distinct.  I agree that homophones make things difficult for Chinese learners, but this needs to be better quantified.  --Beirne (talk) 14:40, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yep, this is one of the many Chinese-related articles here that clearly was written by someone not very familiar with Chinese. I'm going to add it to my to-do list. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 14:49, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Homophones 

message: It seems that there is a lot of advertisments within the links? Is this acceptable?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.6.215.35 (talk) 20:04, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: No, they almost all need to be removed (and I have since done so). Thanks for pointing this out. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 20:11, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Weblinks 

message: Does he really speak Chinese? Colipon+(Talk) 13:23, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I was also skeptical when it was added, but checking his WP article yields this which said he minored in Chinese; I assume he's at least taken a year of it, although who knows if he's any good. In any case, though, I think this list has gotten out of hand and is mostly unnecessary; it needs to be either totally removed, or trimmed down to only the most notable ones (like Needham) and given clear inclusion criteria so we can keep people from adding everyone they can think of. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 14:37, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm a bit unsure about whether or not to have that list there at all. There is always the alternative of creating a new page or just making a new category. Yet it somehow is interesting to see who has Chinese skills, so I'm a bit reserved about hitting the delete button. Colipon+(Talk) 16:41, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tim Geithner 

message: A lot of the text in the article talks about "The Chinese language" or "Chinese" when it means Mandarin.  The very title of the article invites people to assume there is a language called "Chinese".  This is confusing and inaccurate.  A lot of readers will be fuzzy on the distinctions, and this article will only make them fuzzier. (See ).  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.31.112.212 (talk) 08:52, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Your heading is already wrong. It implies that Mandarin is not Chinese at all. People insisting on differentiating between these two are only found in the English-speaking world because the first immigrants were Cantonese. Therefore people thought Cantonese was the default Chinese language. In other languages, you will rarely find the term "Mandarin", only when you wanted to make a distinction between different variations of Chinese. The definition of a language is not stable. Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and Montenegrin are now considered different languages due to political reasons although they are more similar than Chinese dialects, even if you count the dialect groups as languages, the dialects within the group are not always mutual intelligible. --2.245.213.216 (talk) 23:17, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mandarin ≠ Chinese 

message: Should people like Leehom Wang, who are ethnically Chinese but who grew up speaking another language (in this case English) and only learned Chinese as adults, be included in the list of "notable non-native speakers of Chinese"? Previous discussion between two editors (and one 3O editor) is in the preceding section. From the discussion above, one view is that they should because they are indeed non-native speakers, and one view is that they should not because the list would get long. Discussion has become circular so I am requesting comment from outsiders to avoid an edit war happening. rʨanaɢ (talk) 03:14, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: * Support CWH in scrapping the list and creating a category instead. A giant list of Chinese speakers seems like trivia and hard to maintain. If it is to stand, however, speakers who learned the language as adults are indeed non-native speakers of Chinese and should be included. kara❈talk 22:49, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

text: *In principle I agree with your suggestion, CWH. I just wanted to point out that there is in fact a way of deciding who's notable: if they have an article. Lists like these generally don't include redlinks (if there is a legitimate gap in the encyclopedia---someone who's really notable and would fit the list, but no one has bothered to create the article yet---then someone can create the stub when adding the person to the list). Notwithstanding that, though, I do agree the list is difficult to manage. Although categories also come with their own problems (e.g., the fact that no one can 'watch' what's added to or removed from a category the way they can a list). rʨanaɢ (talk) 18:23, 13 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: RfC: inclusion of ethnic Chinese non-native speakers

message: How could Chinese be derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs? This statement seems ridiculous. Was Kircher really not kidding? Did he really believe that? Is his statement only included to show Western people's ignorance? Then I agree on keeping it, but otherwise it should be removed. --2.245.213.216 (talk) 23:23, 6 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Add it to your list of unbelievable things that people really believed! See Phlogiston theory. And Kircher was not alone. Mungello and Saussy are among the many reliable sources as to this lunacy. ch (talk) 07:47, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  China as Egyptian colony 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
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*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110517044311/http://ricci.rt.usfca.edu/biography/view.aspx?biographyID=1071 to http://ricci.rt.usfca.edu/biography/view.aspx?biographyID=1071
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061217005026/http://www.cityu.edu.hk/ccs/Newsletter/newsletter8/unsungTrailblazers.html to http://www.cityu.edu.hk/ccs/Newsletter/newsletter8/unsungTrailblazers.html
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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: As of 23rd Feb 2018, the article predominantly discussed Chinese as a foreign language in the West only, while the title itself, "Chinese as a foreign language", appears to be discussing a much broader issue.
That implies, we have two options to improve:
* Change the page title to "Chinese as a foreign language in the West" (or expressed otherwise).
* Keep adding materials for the studies of Chinese languages in other socio-geographic sectors of humans.
I personally would prefer the first. Also, in addition to the renaming (moving), we can create a disambiguation page with the title "Chinese as a foreign language (disambiguation)", redirect "Chinese as a foreign language" to "Chinese as a foreign language in the West", and put a line of disambiguation notice on the top of the article "Chinese as a foreign language in the West".
Thank you.
Anemseus (talk) 06:53, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Page title, again 

message: In the lead section, it says "China has helped 60,000 teachers promote its language internationally, and an estimated 40 million people were studying Chinese as a second language around the world at the end of 2008." A significant factoid, but (a) I clicked on the link, and the page was no longer there (see Link rot); and (b) said figure ought to be updated; e.g. how many people were learning Chinese as a second/ foreign language as of c. 2017? Link rots, which i have understandably encountered before on Wikipedia, should of course be fixed.--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 02:48, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I've added an archive URL. If you can find a more up-to-date reference, please add it and update the figures. Phlar (talk) 15:35, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  To be fixed