Chinese as a foreign or second language is when non-native speakers study

Chinese varieties There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China ...

. The increased interest in China from those outside has led to a corresponding interest in the study of

Standard Chinese Standard Chinese ( zh, s=现代标准汉语, t=現代標準漢語, p=Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ, l=modern standard Han speech) is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912–1949). ...

(a type of

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretch ...

) as a foreign language, the official language of

mainland China "Mainland China", also referred to as "the Chinese mainland", is a Geopolitics, geopolitical term defined as the territory under direct administration of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War. In addit ...

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...

and

Singapore Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet. It is about one degree ...

. However, the teaching of Chinese both within and outside China is not a recent phenomenon. Westerners began learning different Chinese varieties in the 16th century. Within China, Mandarin became the official language in the early 20th century. Mandarin also became the official language of Taiwan when the

Kuomintang The Kuomintang (KMT) is a major political party in the Republic of China (Taiwan). It was the one party state, sole ruling party of the country Republic of China (1912-1949), during its rule from 1927 to 1949 in Mainland China until Retreat ...

took over control from

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

after World War II. In 2010, 750,000 people (670,000 from overseas) took the Chinese Proficiency Test. For comparison, in 2005, 117,660 non-native speakers took the test, an increase of 26.52% from 2004. From 2000 to 2004, the number of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland taking Advanced Level exams in Chinese increased by 57%. An independent school in the UK made Chinese one of their compulsory subjects for study in 2006. The study of Chinese is also rising in the United States. Th
USC U.S.-China Institute
cited a report that 51,582 students were studying the language in US colleges and universities. While far behind the more than 800,000 students who study Spanish, the number is more than three times higher than in 1986. The Institute's report includes graphs and details on the popularity of other languages. As of 2008, China had helped 60,000 teachers promote its language internationally, and an estimated 40 million people were studying Chinese as a second language around the world. Other than Standard Mandarin,

Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...

is also widely taught as a foreign language. It is the official language of

Hong Kong Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...

and

Macau Macau or Macao is a special administrative regions of China, special administrative region of the People's Republic of China (PRC). With a population of about people and a land area of , it is the most List of countries and dependencies by p ...

and has traditionally been the dominant language among most

Overseas Chinese Overseas Chinese people are Chinese people, people of Chinese origin who reside outside Greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan). As of 2011, there were over 40.3 million overseas Chinese. As of 2023, there were 10.5 milli ...

communities. A number of universities outside Hong Kong and Macau offer Cantonese within their Chinese-language departments as well, especially in the UK and North America.

Taiwanese Hokkien Taiwanese Hokkien ( , ), or simply Taiwanese, also known as Taigi ( zh, c=臺語, tl=Tâi-gí), Taiwanese Southern Min ( zh, c=臺灣閩南語, tl=Tâi-uân Bân-lâm-gí), Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively ...

is taught at the International Chinese Language Program, Taipei Language Institute and other schools.

History

The interpretation of the Chinese language in the West began with some misunderstandings. Since the earliest appearance of

Chinese character Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represent the only on ...

s in the West, the belief that written Chinese was

ideographic An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek 'idea' + 'to write') is a symbol that is used within a given writing system to represent an idea or concept in a given language. (Ideograms are contrasted with phonograms, which indicate sounds of speech ...

prevailed. Such a belief led to

Athanasius Kircher Athanasius Kircher (2 May 1602 – 27 November 1680) was a German Society of Jesus, Jesuit scholar and polymath who published around 40 major works of comparative religion, geology, and medicine. Kircher has been compared to fellow Jes ...

's conjecture that Chinese characters were derived from the

Egyptian hieroglyphs Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined Ideogram, ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct char ...

, China being a colony of Egypt. John Webb, the British architect, went a step further. In a Biblical vein similar to Kircher's, he tried to demonstrate that Chinese was the Primitive or Adamic language. In his ''An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language'' (1669), he suggested that Chinese was the language spoken before the confusion of tongues. Inspired by these ideas,

Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (or Leibnitz; – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Sir Isaac Newton, with the creation of calculus in addition to many ...

and

Bacon Bacon is a type of Curing (food preservation), salt-cured pork made from various cuts of meat, cuts, typically the pork belly, belly or less fatty parts of the back. It is eaten as a side dish (particularly in breakfasts), used as a central in ...

, among others, dreamt of inventing a ''

characteristica universalis The Latin term ''characteristica universalis'', commonly interpreted as ''universal characteristic'', or ''universal character'' in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scienti ...

'' modelled on Chinese. Thus wrote Bacon: Leibniz placed high hopes on the Chinese characters: The serious study of the language in the West began with

missionaries A missionary is a member of a religious group who is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.Thomas Hale 'On Being a Miss ...

coming to China during the late 16th century. Among the first were the Italian

Jesuits The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...

Michele Ruggieri Michele Ruggieri, SJ (born Pompilio Ruggieri and known in China as Luo Mingjian; 1543 – 11 May 1607) was an Italian Jesuit priest and missionary. A founding father of the Jesuit China missions, co-author of the first European–Chinese dictiona ...

and

Matteo Ricci Matteo Ricci (; ; 6 October 1552 – 11 May 1610) was an Italian Jesuit priest and one of the founding figures of the Jesuit China missions. He created the , a 1602 map of the world written in Chinese characters. In 2022, the Apostolic See decl ...

. They mastered the language without the aid of any grammar books or dictionaries, and are often viewed as the first Western

sinologist Sinology, also referred to as China studies, is a subfield of area studies or East Asian studies involved in social sciences and humanities research on China. It is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of the Chinese civilizatio ...

s. Ruggieri set up a school in

, which was the first for teaching foreigners Chinese and translated part of the ''

Great Learning The ''Great Learning'' or ''Daxue'' was one of the " Four Books" in Confucianism attributed to one of Confucius' disciples, Zengzi. The ''Great Learning'' had come from a chapter in the '' Book of Rites'' which formed one of the Five Classi ...

'' into

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

. This was the first translation of a

Confucian Confucianism, also known as Ruism or Ru classicism, is a system of thought and behavior originating in ancient China, and is variously described as a tradition, philosophy, religion, theory of government, or way of life. Founded by Confucius ...

classic into any European language. He also wrote a religious tract in Chinese, the first Chinese book written by a Westerner. Matteo Ricci brought Western sciences to China, and became a prolific Chinese writer. With his wide 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 the ''

Complete Library of the Four Treasuries The ''Siku Quanshu'', literally the ''Complete Library of the Four Treasuries'', is a Chinese encyclopedia commissioned during the Qing dynasty by the Qianlong Emperor. Commissioned in 1772 and completed in 1782, the ''Siku quanshu'' is the larg ...

'', the imperial collection of Chinese classics. Some of his religious works were listed in the collection's bibliography, but not collected. Ricci-Ruggieri-Portuguese-Chinese-dictionary-page-1

Ricci-Ruggieri-Portuguese-Chinese-dictionary-page-1

Ricci and Ruggieri, with the help of the Chinese Jesuit Lay Brother Sebastiano Fernandez (also spelled Fernandes; 1562–1621), are thought to have created the first Portuguese-Chinese dictionary some time between 1583 and 1588. Later, while travelling on the

Grand Canal of China The Grand Canal () is a system of interconnected canals linking various major rivers and lakes in North and East China, serving as an important waterborne transport infrastructure between the north and the south during Medieval and premodern ...

from

Beijing Beijing, Chinese postal romanization, previously romanized as Peking, is the capital city of China. With more than 22 million residents, it is the world's List of national capitals by population, most populous national capital city as well as ...

Linqing Linqing () is a county-level city under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Liaocheng in western Shandong Province, China. Geography and climate It is located north-northwest of Liaocheng. The city is situated at the confluence ...

during the winter of 1598, Ricci, with the help of Lazzaro Cattaneo (1560–1640) and Sebastiano Fernandez, also compiled a Chinese-Portuguese dictionary. In this latter work, thanks to Cattaneo's musical ear, a system was introduced for marking the tones of romanized Chinese syllables with diacritical marks. The distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants was also made clear through the use of apostrophes, as in the much later Wade-Giles system. Although neither of the two dictionaries were published—the former only came to light in the Vatican Secret Archives in 1934, and saw publication in 2001, while the latter has not been found so far—Ricci made the transcription system developed in 1598, and in 1626 it was finally published, with minor modifications, by another Jesuit

Nicolas Trigault Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628) was a Jesuit, and a missionary in China. He was also known by his latinised name Nicolaus Trigautius or Trigaultius, and his Chinese name Jin Nige (). Life and work Born in Douai (then part of the County of Flanders ...

in a guide for new Jesuit missionaries. The system continued to be in wide use throughout the 17th and 18th century. It can be seen in several Romanized Chinese texts (prepared mostly by Michael Boym and his Chinese collaborators) that appeared in

's ''China Illustrata''."Dicionário Português-Chinês : 葡汉辞典 (Pu-Han cidian): Portuguese-Chinese dictionary", by Michele Ruggieri, Matteo Ricci; edited by John W. Witek. Published 2001, Biblioteca Nacional.
Partial preview
available on

Google Books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...

. Pages 184-185, 196-197.Ruggieri's biography
at the Ricci 21st Century Roundtable database. The transcription of the Nestorian Stele can be found in pp. 13-28 of ''China Illustrata'', which i
available online on Google Books
The same book also has a

catechism A catechism (; from , "to teach orally") is a summary or exposition of Catholic theology, doctrine and serves as a learning introduction to the Sacraments traditionally used in catechesis, or Christian religious teaching of children and adult co ...

in Romanized Chinese, using apparently the same transcription with tone marks. (pp. 121-127) Ricciportrait

The earliest Chinese grammars were produced by the Spanish Dominican missionaries. The earliest surviving one is by

Francisco Varo Francisco Varo (October 4, 1627 – January 31, 1687) was a Spanish Dominican friar, missionary in China, and author of the second grammar of Mandarin Chinese in a western language, "Arte de la lengua mandarina" (1703). His Chinese names were Wan F ...

(1627–1687). His ''Arte de la Lengua Mandarina'' was published in Canton in 1703. 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 Malacca (), officially the Historic State of Malacca (), is a States and federal territories of Malaysia, state in Malaysia located in the Peninsular Malaysia#Other features, southern region of the Malay Peninsula, facing the Strait of Malacca ...

in 1831. Other important grammar texts followed, from

Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (; 5 September 1788 – 2 June 1832) was a French sinologist best known as the first Chair of Sinology at the Collège de France. Rémusat studied medicine as a young man, but his discovery of a Chinese herbal treati ...

's ''Élémens'' (sic) ''de la grammaire chinoise'' in 1822 to

Georg von der Gabelentz Georg von der Gabelentz (16 March 1840 – 11 December 1893) was a German general linguist and sinologist. His (1881), according to a critic, "remains until today recognized as probably the finest overall grammatical survey of the Classical Chine ...

's ''Chinesische Grammatik'' in 1881. Glossaries for Chinese circulated among the missionaries from early on. Robert Morrison's '' A Dictionary of the Chinese Language'' (1815-1823), noted for its fine printing, is one of the first important

Chinese dictionaries There are two types of dictionaries regularly used in the Chinese language: list individual Chinese characters, and list words and phrases. Because tens of thousands of characters have been used in written Chinese, Chinese lexicographers have d ...

for the use of Westerners. Due to the status of Guangzhou as the only Chinese port open to foreign trade and exchange in the 1700s,

became the variety of Chinese that came into the most interaction with the Western world in early modern times. Foreign works on Chinese were largely centered around this variant until the opening up of other Chinese regions for commerce through

unequal treaties The unequal treaties were a series of agreements made between Asian countries—most notably Qing China, Tokugawa Japan and Joseon Korea—and Western countries—most notably the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, the Unit ...

, which exposed European scholars to a much larger number of

. In 1814, a chair of Chinese and

Manchu The Manchus (; ) are a Tungusic peoples, Tungusic East Asian people, East Asian ethnic group native to Manchuria in Northeast Asia. They are an officially recognized Ethnic minorities in China, ethnic minority in China and the people from wh ...

was founded at the

Collège de France The (), formerly known as the or as the ''Collège impérial'' founded in 1530 by François I, is a higher education and research establishment () in France. It is located in Paris near La Sorbonne. The has been considered to be France's most ...

, and Abel-Rémusat became the first Professor of Chinese in Europe. In 1837,

Nikita Bichurin Nikita Yakovlevich Bichurin (; – ), better known under his archimandrite monastic name Hyacinth, sometimes known as Joacinth or Iakinf, was one of the founding fathers of Russian Sinology. He translated many works from Chinese into Russian, w ...

opened the first European Chinese-language school in the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...

. 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 Sir William Jones (28 September 1746 – 27 April 1794) was a British philologist, orientalist, Indologist and judge. Born in Westminster, London to Welsh mathematician William Jones, he moved to the Bengal Presidency where Jones served as ...

dabbled in it; instigated by Abel-Rémusat,

Wilhelm von Humboldt Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt (22 June 1767 – 8 April 1835) was a German philosopher, linguist, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1949, the university was named aft ...

studied the language seriously, and discussed it in several letters with the French professor. Local Chinese variants were still widely used up until a

Qing dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing, was a Manchu-led Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China and an early modern empire in East Asia. The last imperial dynasty in Chinese history, the Qing dynasty was preceded by the ...

decree in 1909 that mandated Mandarin as the official language of China. After this period, only Cantonese and Mandarin remained as the most influential variants of Chinese, the former due to the importance of maritime trade in Guangzhou and the emergence of Hong Kong as a key economy in East Asia. Chinese departments in the West were largely centered on Cantonese due to British colonial rule over Hong Kong until the opening of communist-ruled China starting in the 1970s. The teaching of Chinese as a foreign language in the

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

started in 1950 at

Tsinghua University Tsinghua University (THU) is a public university in Haidian, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education of China. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Constructio ...

, initially serving students from Eastern Europe. Starting with

Bulgaria Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey t ...

in 1952, China also dispatched Chinese teachers abroad, and by the early 1960s had sent teachers afar as the Congo,

Cambodia Cambodia, officially the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country in Southeast Asia on the Mainland Southeast Asia, Indochinese Peninsula. It is bordered by Thailand to the northwest, Laos to the north, and Vietnam to the east, and has a coastline ...

Yemen Yemen, officially the Republic of Yemen, is a country in West Asia. Located in South Arabia, southern Arabia, it borders Saudi Arabia to Saudi Arabia–Yemen border, the north, Oman to Oman–Yemen border, the northeast, the south-eastern part ...

and

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

. In 1962, with the approval of the State Council, the Higher Preparatory School for Foreign Students was set up, later renamed the Beijing Language and Culture University. The programs were disrupted for several years during the

Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a Social movement, sociopolitical movement in the China, People's Republic of China (PRC). It was launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and lasted until his de ...

. According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, there are 330 institutions teaching Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language, receiving about 40,000 foreign students. In addition, there are almost 5,000 Chinese language teachers. Since 1992 the State Education Commission has managed a Chinese language proficiency exam program, which tests has been taken around 100 million times (including by domestic ethnic minority candidates). Within China's

Guangdong Province ) means "wide" or "vast", and has been associated with the region since the creation of Guang Prefecture in AD 226. The name "''Guang''" ultimately came from Guangxin ( zh, labels=no, first=t, t= , s=广信), an outpost established in Han dynasty ...

, Cantonese is also offered in some schools as optional or extra-curricular courses in select Chinese-as-a-foreign-language programs, although many require students to be proficient in Mandarin first.

Difficulty

Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn for people whose native language is English, together with

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

, Japanese and Korean. According to the

Foreign Service Institute The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the United States federal government's primary training institution for members of the U.S. foreign service community, preparing American diplomats as well as other professionals to advance U.S. foreign ...

, a native English speaker needs over 2,200 hours of intensive study, taking 88 weeks (one year and about 8 months), to learn Mandarin. A quote attributed to William Milne, Morrison's colleague, goes that learning Chinese is Two major difficulties stand out: characters and tones.

Characters

While English uses an alphabet, Chinese uses ''

hanzi Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represent the only one ...

'', or Chinese characters, as its writing system.Moser, David (1991) �
Why Chinese is So Damn Hard

. In: Mair, Victor H. (ed.)
''Schriftfestschrift : Essays on Writing and Language in Honor of John DeFrancis on his Eightieth Birthday''. Sino-Platonic Papers No. 27Archive
(

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

). August 31, 1991. p. 59-70 (PDF document 71-82/260). The ''

Kangxi dictionary The ''Kangxi Dictionary'' () is a Chinese dictionary published in 1716 during the High Qing, considered from the time of its publishing until the early 20th century to be the most authoritative reference for written Chinese characters. Wanting ...

'' contains 47,035 characters (). However, most of the characters contained there are archaic and obscure. The Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese (), promulgated in the

, lists 2,500 common characters and 1,000 less-than-common characters, while the Chart of Generally Utilized Characters of Modern Chinese () lists 7,000 characters, including the 3,500 characters already listed above. In his 1991 article "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard", David Moser states that an English speaker would find the "ridiculous" writing system "unreasonably hard to learn" to the level of achieving literacy due to the large number of characters. Moser argued that he was unable to "comfortably read" a newspaper even though he knew 2,000 characters. The 17th-century Protestant theologian Elias Grebniz, said that Chinese characters were: In Gautier's novella '' Fortunio'', a Chinese professor from the

, when asked by the protagonist to translate a love letter suspected to be written in Chinese, replied that the characters in the letter happen to all belong to that half of the 40,000 characters which he has yet to master. The overwhelming majority of characters contain phonetic parts, but their use is complicated by several factors. First, Chinese characters have been in use for longer than English was written and yet saw very little orthographic reform to align them with how Chinese changed over time. Two, in mainland China phonetic parts were removed from some characters in order to make handwriting faster. Three, there are characters that have different readings depending on the word. The

Japanese writing system The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of Logogram, logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and Syllabary, syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabary, syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for n ...

suffers from the same issues.

Tones

has four

tone Tone may refer to: Visual arts and color-related * Tone (color theory), a mix of tint and shade, in painting and color theory * Tone (color), the lightness or brightness (as well as darkness) of a color * Toning (coin), color change in coins * ...

s (), namely the first tone (flat or high level tone, 阴平, denoted by " ¯ " in

Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...

), the second tone (rising or high-rising tone, 阳平, denoted by " ˊ " in Pinyin), the third tone (falling-rising or low tone, 上声, denoted by " ˇ " in Pinyin), and the fourth tone (falling or high-falling tone, 去声, denoted by " ˋ " in Pinyin). There is also a fifth tone called neutral (轻声, denoted as no-mark in Pinyin) although the official name of the tones is Four Tones. Many other Chinese dialects have more, for example,

has six (often numbered as nine, but three are duplicates). In most Western languages, tones are only used to express emphasis or emotion, not to distinguish meanings as in Chinese. A French

Jesuit The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...

, in a letter, relates how the Chinese tones cause a problem for understanding: Moser also stated that tones were a contributing factor to the difficulty of learning Chinese, partly because it is difficult for non-native learners to use Chinese intonation whilst retaining the correct tones.

Sources of education

Chinese courses have been blooming internationally since 2000 at every level of education. 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 teaching of Chinese as a foreign language is known as ''duiwai hanyu jiaoxue'' (). The

Confucius Institute Confucius Institutes (CI; ) are public educational and cultural promotion programs of the state of China. The stated aim of the program is to promote Chinese language and culture, support local Chinese teaching internationally, and facilita ...

, supervised by Hanban (the National Office For Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language), promotes the Chinese language in the West and other parts of the world. The

began to accept foreign students from the communist countries (in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa) from the 1950s onwards. Foreign students were forced to leave the PRC during the

has long been a place for students to study Mandarin. Popular choices for Westerners who want to study Chinese abroad include the Beijing Language and Culture University in

, the Mandarin Training Center (MTC) and International Chinese Language Program (ICLP, formerly the Stanford Center) in

, and the

Chinese University of Hong Kong The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is a public university, public research university in Sha Tin, New Territories, Hong Kong. Established in 1963 as a federation of three university college, collegesChung Chi College, New Asia Coll ...

. Many online courses in

Standard Mandarin Standard Chinese ( zh, s=现代标准汉语, t=現代標準漢語, p=Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ, l=modern standard Han speech) is a modern Standard language, standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the Republic of ...

Standard Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While the ...

and some other varieties are available through commercial, governmental and nonprofit websites catering to speakers of English and over a hundred other languages. Free and Paid-for courses are also offered via

podcast A podcast is a Radio program, program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. Typically, a podcast is an Episode, episodic series of digital audio Computer file, files that users can download to a personal device or str ...

s. Software is also available to help students pronounce, read and translate Chinese into English and other languages. Teaching the

varieties of Chinese There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages, Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the m ...

to non-native speakers is discouraged by the laws of the People's Republic of China. In Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, some Bumiputera and Indian send their children to Chinese primary school. In recent years several independent language learners have used online resources and immersion techniques to learn Mandarin to various degrees of fluency, without relying on formal courses. Among those who have documented their progress are Benny Lewis and Will Hart. Both focussed primarily on achieving oral proficiency by communicating with native speakers from an early stage in their learning.

Notable non-native speakers of Chinese

Viktor Axelsen Viktor Axelsen (born 4 January 1994) is a Danish badminton player. He is a two-time Badminton at the Summer Olympics, Olympic Champion, two-time BWF World Championships, World Champion, and four-time European Badminton Championships, European Cha ...

: Danish national badminton player * Kenji Doihara: Japanese general and World War II war criminal *

Ai Fukuhara is a retired Japanese table tennis player and Olympic medalist, winning silver at the 2012 Summer Olympics and bronze at the 2016 Summer Olympics with the Japanese women's team. She is sponsored by All Nippon Airways. Table tennis career Fuku ...

: Japanese national table-tennis player *

Ronald Graham Ronald Lewis Graham (October 31, 1935July 6, 2020) was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He ...

: American mathematician * James Kynge: British, a regular commentator on Chinese and Asian issues. * John Rabe: German businessman, saved thousands of Chinese people from slaughter during the

Nanking massacre The Nanjing Massacre, or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as ''Nanking'') was the mass murder of Chinese civilians, noncombatants, and surrendered prisoners of war by the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanjing, the capital of the Republ ...

. * Sidney Rittenberg: American interpreter, Communist and businessman * Katharine Gun: British intelligence agent *

Richard Sorge Richard Gustavovich Sorge (; 4 October 1895 – 7 November 1944) was a German-Russian journalist and GRU (Soviet Union), Soviet military intelligence officer who was active before and during World War II and worked undercover as a German journa ...

: Soviet spy * George Thomas Staunton: English traveller, Orientalist and translator * Adam von Trott zu Solz: German diplomat and participant in the

German resistance to Nazism The German resistance to Nazism () included unarmed and armed opposition and disobedience to the Nazi Germany, Nazi regime by various movements, groups and individuals by various means, from assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler, attempts to ass ...

* James Veneris: American Korean War veteran; settled in Shandong province after the war * Ruth Weiss: Austrian-born Chinese-naturalized journalist *

Bob Woodruff Robert Warren Woodruff (born August 18, 1961) is an American television journalist. Since 1996, he has served as a reporter for ABC News (United States), ABC News. Woodruff co-anchored ''ABC World News Tonight'' in 2006 with journalist Elizabeth ...

: American television journalist, ABC News *

Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born May 14, 1984) is an American businessman who co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is the chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling sharehold ...

: American businessman, founder of

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

* Thinaah Muralitharan: Malaysian of Indian descent badminton player

Politicians, government servants and nobility

* Cecil Clementi:

Governor of Hong Kong The governor of Hong Kong was the representative of the United Kingdom, British The Crown, Crown in British Hong Kong, Hong Kong from 1843 to 1997. In this capacity, the governor was president of the Executive Council of Hong Kong, Executiv ...

from 1925–30 *

Cường Để Cường Để (, ; born Nguyễn Phúc Dân ( vi-hantu, 阮福民); 11 January 1882 - 5 April 1951) was an early 20th-century Vietnamese revolutionary and nationalist who, along with Phan Bội Châu, unsuccessfully tried to liberate Vietnam from ...

: Vietnamese prince * Elsie Elliott: British-born Hong Kong politician *

Timothy Geithner Timothy Franz Geithner (; born August 18, 1961) is an American former central banker who served as the 75th United States secretary of the treasury under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. He was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank o ...

United States Secretary of the Treasury The United States secretary of the treasury is the head of the United States Department of the Treasury, and is the chief financial officer of the federal government of the United States. The secretary of the treasury serves as the principal a ...

* W. Michael Blumenthal:

Henrik, Prince Consort of Denmark Prince Henrik of Denmark (; born Henri Marie Jean André de Laborde de Monpezat; 11 June 1934 – 13 February 2018) was the husband of Margrethe II of Denmark. He served as her List of Danish royal consorts, royal consort from Margrethe's a ...

: Danish prince consort *

Herbert Hoover Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. A wealthy mining engineer before his presidency, Hoover led the wartime Commission for Relief in Belgium and ...

: US president (limited use) *

Ho Chi Minh (born ; 19 May 1890 – 2 September 1969), colloquially known as Uncle Ho () among other aliases and sobriquets, was a Vietnamese revolutionary and politician who served as the founder and first President of Vietnam, president of the ...

: Vietnamese revolutionary *

Jon Huntsman, Jr. Jon Meade Huntsman Jr. (born March 26, 1960) is an American politician, businessman, and diplomat who served as the 16th governor of Utah from 2005 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he served as the L ...

: US Ambassador to China; former Governor of

Utah Utah is a landlocked state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, sharing a border with Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. It also borders Wyoming to the northea ...

. * Banri Kaieda: Japanese politician and former leader of the DPJ *

Kim Il Sung Kim Il Sung (born Kim Song Ju; 15 April 1912 – 8 July 1994) was a North Korean politician and the founder of North Korea, which he led as its first Supreme Leader (North Korean title), supreme leader from North Korea#Founding, its establishm ...

: North Korean leader *

Karim Massimov Karim Qajymqanuly Massimov (, , ; born 15 June 1965)Kazakhstan moves to ...

: Kazakh Prime Minister *

Park Geun-hye Park Geun-hye (; ; born 2 February 1952) is a South Korean politician who served as the 11th president of South Korea from 2013 until Impeachment of Park Geun-hye, she was removed from office in 2017. Park was the first and to date only woman ...

: South Korean President * Matthew Pottinger: US politician and Deputy National Security Advisor *

Kevin Rudd Kevin Michael Rudd (born 21 September 1957) is an Australian diplomat and former politician who served as the 26th prime minister of Australia from 2007 to 2010 and June to September 2013. He held office as the Leaders of the Australian Labo ...

: former Prime Minister of Australia * Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn: Thai crown princess *

Mulatu Teshome Mulatu Teshome Wirtu (; ; born 1957) is an Ethiopian politician who was president of Ethiopia from 2013 to 2018. Biography Mulatu was born in the town of Arjo in Welega Province. He was educated in China, receiving his bachelor's degree in p ...

: Ethiopian President * Kassym-Jomart Tokayev: Kazakh President * Alice Weidel: German politician * Barbara Woodward: English diplomat and permanent representative to the United Nations * Maria Zakharova: Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman

Educators, historians, linguists and writers

* Frederick W. Baller: British missionary, linguist, translator, educator and sinologist * Pearl S. Buck: American novelist, author of ''The Good Earth'', winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature * John DeFrancis: American linguist * Arif Dirlik: Turkish historian * Wolfram Eberhard: German sociologist * Peter Hessler: American writer and journalist * Bernhard Karlgren: Swedish sinologist * George A. Kennedy (sinologist), George Kennedy: American sinologist and developer of Yale romanization of Mandarin, Yale romanization * Joseph Needham: English sinologist * Stephen Owen (academic), Stephen Owen: American sinologist and literary analyst * Phan Bội Châu: Vietnamese scholar and nationalist * Vikram Seth: Indian academic * Sidney Shapiro: American translator; acquired Chinese citizenship. * Gary Snyder: American poet and essayist. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. * Ezra Vogel: American academic * Samuel Wells Williams: American missionary, linguist, and diplomat

Missionaries

* L. Nelson Bell: American Missionary father-in-law of Billy Graham * John Birch (missionary), John Birch: American missionary and namesake of the John Birch Society * Walter Henry Medhurst: British missionary and translator * Timothy Richard: American Baptist missionary * Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky: Russian-born Bishop of Shanghai * Hudson Taylor: British missionary and founder of the China Inland Mission

Actors, entertainers and cultural performers

* Shila Amzah: International multi-award winning Malaysian singer-songwriter * Sola Aoi: Japanese model and actress * Jessica Beinecke: American entertainer and host of online show ''OMG Meiyu'' * Vanessa Branch: English American actress * John Cena: American professional wrestler * Dashan: Canadian stage performer famous in China * Afu Thomas, Thomas Derksen: German-born online celebrity active in China * Raz Gal-Or: Israeli businessman and online celebrity active in China * William Hootkins: American actor * Nana (singer), Im Jin-ah: South Korean singer and actress * Dimash Kudaibergen: Kazakh singer and lyricist * Ladybeard: Australian cross-dressing entertainer * Jeff Locker: American television host active in Taiwan * Michiko Nishiwaki: Japanese actress * Mira Sorvino: American actress * Ryo Takeuchi (director), Ryo Takeuchi: Japanese film director * Abigail Washburn: American musician; singer, banjo player; performs in China and in the US * Wang Leehom, Leehom Wang: American-born singer, ethnic Han Chinese, Han, but didn't learn Chinese until 18 *Oh Hyuk: South Korean singer, songwriter and main vocal of Band Hyukoh *Kim Go-eun: South Korean actress *Jun Hyun-moo, Jeon Hyun-moo: South Korean announcer and performer *Dean Fujioka: Japanese actor, musician, model *Xiaomanyc, Arieh Smith: American Youtuber known for his ability to speak Mandarin Chinese among other languages