Do you find Wale-Giles more intuitive?

[Ruben von Zwack]

This is true. For many years Oxbridge distained spoken languages and only taught ancient texts. I once watched an interview with an Anthropologist who did Chinese at Oxford or Cambridge in the sixties and at the end of his three years suddenly realised he couldn't speak a word of Chinese.

Not only British universities, I think it's an all-European phenomena. I wonder if the simple reason in the beginning was that you had no sound recordings available. Goethe learnt how to read and write Chinese poetry.

Even given that he had a phonetic transcription system, and even assuming that the system was at least consequent, still, how was a scholar around that time (late 18th and early 19th century) supposed to learn how Chinese even remotely sounded, or how it was spoken in daily life?

[mouse]

I wonder if the simple reason in the beginning was that you had no sound recordings available. Goethe learnt how to read and write Chinese poetry.

Even given that he had a phonetic transcription system, and even assuming that the system was at least consequent, still, how was a scholar around that time (late 18th and early 19th century) supposed to learn how Chinese even remotely sounded, or how it was spoken in daily life?

The lack of sound material is definitely an issue, especially for interested amateurs like Goethe. But I don't think it's the reason why so many universities of the time focused exclusively on ancient texts. If it were only a matter of access to the spoken language, then they would have offered modern European languages at Oxford and Cambridge, but in fact they didn't for a long time. In fact, philology grew out of biblical exegesis, so at first only languages related to biblical texts were studied: ancient Greek, Latin, Herbrew, Arabic, etc. Chinese and other East Asian languages were neglected for quite some time and were only really studied by missionaries trying to translate the bible.

[Guest realmayo]

Yes, I think the idea of the university as a place where you go to improve your skills is relatively modern, with the earlier focus more on learning/scholarship? So the idea of someone in (say) 1950s England wanting to learn Chinese so he could talk to Chinese people would instead have been seen as more vocational, I think?

[Lu]

I think people who learn wenyan should already be proficient in Chinese. They should be able to read Chinese reference books and Chinese dictionaries. No?

I started learning wenyan in my first year (in Leiden), and used Mathews and other W-G dictionaries to help make sense of it. I agree with other posters that there is no need to postpone learning wenyan until you can use a Chinese dictionary, it's useful to learn it alongside Mandarin if you have the time.

As to why Oxbridge etc concentrated on wenyan: perhaps it was because until the early 1900s, that was what higher culture in China was written in, Chinese scholars themselves read and produced mainly wenyan texts. After that, I suppose it took a while for everyone to catch on to the fact that baihua and Mandarin were becoming important, relevant and worthwhile to study, but before everyone could really get into it, there was civil war, then revolution, and then hardly anyone could go to China in the first place.

[mouse]

As to why Oxbridge etc concentrated on wenyan: perhaps it was because until the early 1900s, that was what higher culture in China was written in, Chinese scholars themselves read and produced mainly wenyan texts.

This is probably be true for people interested in studying Chinese in general, but not for Oxbridge in particular. They basically weren't interested in Chinese at all. As Robert Irwin puts it in For Lust of Knowing,

When Thomas Wade was appointed to a Chair of Chinese in Cambridge in 1888, he declared that 'I assume that my pupils, should I have any, will be intending missionaries or interpreters... My advice to applicants in either category is that they should make their way to China with all speed.' When, in the following century, Arthur Waley, self-taught in Chinese and a great translator of its poetry, was offered the Cambridge chair, his response was 'I would rather be dead'.

Essentially, Oxbridge only taught classical Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Greek, etc, not the modern languages. That tradition grew out of biblical philology. Most scholars thought modern/living languages beneath them. But Oxbridge were particularly bad when it came to Chinese. France and Germany were miles ahead for a long time. Look at the paucity of English-Classical Chinese dictionaries compared to those in other European languages.

[linkdong]

All most all Chinese mainlander use Pinyin rather than wale-giles. Only those who are well educated may know some very famous wale giles names such as Chiang Kai-Shek, Sun Yat-sen. 99% mainlander can't translate a random Chinese name into Wale-Giles and vice versa.

[OneEye]

I don't see how that's relevant to what's being discussed. Not to mention that "Kai-shek" and "Yat-sen" are not Wade-Giles, they are Cantonese. Wade-Giles is for Mandarin only.