A few days ago, I watched a video of myself talking in perfect Chinese. I’ve been studying the language on and off for only a few years, and I’m far from fluent. But there I was, pronouncing each character flawlessly in the correct tone, just as a native speaker would. Gone were my grammar mistakes and awkward pauses, replaced by a smooth and slightly alien-sounding voice. “My favorite food is sushi,” I said—wo zui xihuan de shiwu shi shousi—with no hint of excitement or joy.
So begins a recent article in The Atlantic by Louise Matsakis, “The End of Foreign-Language Education: Thanks to AI, People May No Longer Feel the Need to Learn a Second Language” (March 26, 2024). The final line, alluding to a 1991 Star Trek episode, nails the point: An AI translator “doesn’t have the power to bridge cultural divides the way that humans can.”
A few days ago, while browsing The New York Times online, an ad for a handheld two-way translation device was repeatedly thrust into my view. (The algorithms must have picked up what I was up to!) I took the bait. “Learning a new language takes months and even years of dedicated studies,” I read. But this device “can transform you into an able-communicator instantly!” Mirabile dictu! (When I saw that Latin is not among the thirty-six languages it supports, I quickly lost my enthusiasm.)
Great sport has been made of C. T. Studd, one of the group of missionaries known as the “Cambridge Seven.” Upon arriving in China in 1885—so it is said—he had hoped to receive the blessing of the “gift of foreign tongues.” Now here was a customer for an AI device!
Whatever C.T.’s initial hopes and expectations—like someone thinking they would be suddenly endowed with the strength and endurance to climb a precipitous Himalayan peak without training—they were quickly tested on Pinnacles of Mandarin. And the truth is that the vast majority of missionaries applied themselves to language learning. And many of them embraced the discipline of deepening their knowledge of the language through diligent study over the years.
University trained men and women arriving in China as missionaries commonly had language-learning skills in tow. Many—particularly the seminary-trained—had already acquired a reading proficiency in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, plus a modern language or two. It was an era when the study of ancient and modern languages was a staple in education.
The Grahams were soon to meet in Qingjiangpu their colleague Absalom Sydenstricker, the father of Pearl Buck. On his evangelistic travels through towns and countryside, Sydenstricker carried with him, in addition to a Chinese Bible, a polyglot Bible of English, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as a German Bible. And he read from them every day.1 Later he produced a colloquial Mandarin translation of the New Testament. In Qingjiangpu they would also meet Henry Woods of their mission. Woods was a scholar of the biblical languages and of Mandarin, who would later work on translating the New Testament for the Union Version of the Bible.
As the Grahams threw themselves into the task of learning Mandarin, Jimmy wrote home, “I had always heard that this language was difficult, but the half had hardly been told.”2 From the outset they must have felt like fragile instruments for communicating the eternal Word in Mandarin. Even at this early stage, it was likely becoming apparent that Sophie, rather than Jimmy, had a natural ear for the language. Many years later, their son James, widely acclaimed for his own fluency in Mandarin, wondered how the Chinese ever understood what his father was saying. Apparently they were blessed with the gift of patient hearing and interpretation.
When Jimmy and Sophie opened their copy of F. W. Baller’s A Mandarin Primer the reality of their task unfurled before their eyes. Baller’s text, first published in 1878 by the China Inland Mission, was a go-to standard among missionaries. Its success and wide use led to subsequent enlarged and improved editions. (Later editions were co-published with The Presbyterian Mission Press in Shanghai, which Woodbridge would head up.)3
A page from the 1911 edition of F. W. Baller’s A Mandarin Primer
Baller’s method fell in line with the book’s genre. The first lesson introduced pronunciation, aspirates, and tones. As for tones, they are “a sort of rhythmical chime,” wrote Baller. “A preacher who has not Tones is apt to be an offence or an infliction to this audience, who at once relegate him to the rank of a poor speaker.”4 “There are five tones in Southern, four in Northern, and theoretically the same number in Western Mandarin.” And so the Table of Tones “should be read over till the ear can distinguish one tone from another and recognize it when heard alone.”5 They had been warned.
What could go wrong? Samuel Woodbridge cautioned: “It is extremely difficult to pronounce some Chinese words so that every one will comprehend.” Homophones were numerous. The Chinese words for wife and chicken are very similar. So too field and heaven, master and pig. [How many pigs with their chicken found themselves in heaven?] Hundreds of these distinctions would be tediously memorized by drill, and shot home in the crucible of error and public embarrassment.6
After an introduction to a Romanized rendering of Chinese (using a system devised by Hudson Taylor), Baller’s Primer quickly moved on to an encounter with Chinese characters, their “radicals” (classified by number of strokes), and how to use the radicals to find words in a Chinese-English dictionary. This was followed by a very rudimentary lesson in writing characters, which for the Chinese was an art form in itself. The lessons then rolled out in a sequence of grammatical categories—pronouns, particles, numeration, verbs, moods, interrogatives and so forth. All with gobbets of text for translation exercises. Finally, Baller offered an extensive and categorized list of useful terms and expressions. From Buddhism to Taoism, from pantry to donkey cart, the Primer doubled as a phrase book.
While Baller provides Romanized renderings alongside Chinese characters, students were expected to be learning the Chinese characters introduced with each lesson. And there were thirty or forty of them for each lesson. These were not the “simplified” and streamlined characters of today. To the novice, many of them were a dense thicket of strokes, some as impenetrable as a QR code. Baller’s was no primer of “conversational Chinese,” with reading and writing reserved for a second-year “200-level” course. Students immediately plunged into two or three levels of complexity layered on top of each other, with no cognate relationships to English.
The Chinese, of course, learned to speak and understand the language from their earliest childhood, but few would ever become literate. It was not that the “illiterate” couldn’t recognize some common characters they encountered on the streets. Some were readily identifiable pictograms, like “mountain” (山) or “rice field” (田), or the numbers “one” (一), “two” (二), and “three” (三). The character for “horse,” though somewhat complex (馬), could be construed as a horse galloping past, legs in stride, head held high, and mane flying. But knowledge of this sort quickly ran thin when trying to read a text of any length. That required schooling. A knowledge of 3,000 characters was considered a good stock for a literate person. A well-educated person might know 6,000, and a true scholar of the classical tradition might swim in thousands more.
By the 1920s the year-long program of the North China Union Language School—founded by missionaries but training the foreign service as well—taught the language by ear, by listening, speaking, and drilling. Not until the second half of the program did they introduce the reading of characters. After a year, students of the school were expected to know 700 characters.7 A good start on their path of further study.
But for the Grahams there was no alternative but to wade in and memorize the visual patterns until they could be recognized on sight. And most of the characters had multiple meanings, depending on their combinations and contexts.
As Samuel Woodbridge put it, “The characters were as nimble as a sunbeam and slipped from the memory like a flash.”8
James R. Graham, “These Seventy Years,” 5.
J. R. Graham’s report in “Letters from the Missions,” The Missionary XXIII (July 1890): 271.
F. W. Baller, A Mandarin Primer, 8th Edition (Shanghai: China Inland Mission and Presbyterian Mission Press, 1911). References are to this edition. It is not certain that the Grahams used Baller’s Primer, but given its wide acceptance it seems highly likely. Samuel Woodbridge, their initial language tutor, would go on to run the Presbyterian Mission Press, which published Baller.
Baller, Primer, viii.
Baller, Primer, ix.
Samuel Isett Woodbridge, Fifty Years in China (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1919), 53.
Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, Book of the Month Club edition (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 66.
Woodbridge, Fifty Years, 52.