I read DeFrancis's book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy some time ago and very much enjoyed his erudition as well as his audacious thinking (he did advocate for doing away with the script altogether). Your article makes me look forward to reading more of his works.

on an archaeology project in the early 1980s, with _Beginning Chinese_ and the accompanying (red) reader as virtually my only after-work reading. It was a great intellectual exercise, and I had a (beginning) reading ability in the language when I came back. No more, alas.

My (as I now refer to him) "emeritus husband" and I were both interested to learn how to "speak Chinese". [Only which one? Mandarin was the language he did learn a little of. Me, I'm still struggling with the wonders of the pictograms.]

This is the first (I regret to say) I've heard of John DeFrancis, but certainly not the first I've heard or cared about the once-called "China Hands" who not only "tangled with" Senator McCarthy but, many of them, lost their jobs because of the "-ism" said (junior senator from Wisconsin, of all places, wasn't he?) Senator's name is associated with.

This post of yours sent me rummaging about in some of the more ?cobwebby? portions of my brain/memory; trying to remember the third of the three who were my generation's "anti-anti-communist" heros (so to speak) as to U.S. "China policy" in the early Chiang Kai Shek/Mao Dse Dong (see I can't even figure out how to spell Chinese name in ?"English"?!) days. John Stewart Service (whom I never knew personally), John Carter Vincent (whom I did) ... and ... who was the third? [Can't remember, and Wikipedia didn't rescue me but never mind ;-)]. "John Carter", as his wife and friends fondly referred to him -- from whom I took a non-credit Radcliffe College "course" on China 'way back in the '50's -- would have been ten years older than John deFrancis; I'm twenty years younger. All of which adds up to nothing much except for a special appreciation for a few threads of connexions in the middle of a miscellaneous night when it's probably the first and last time I'll ever get the chance to be the third person to post a comment to Salon.com! [?! ;-)]

salonmarte

Would the third of the ?"three"? I keep trying to remember (this rather crazy middle of the night moment) all those years ago have been Owen Lattimore?

Here, you see -- for an ?!oldster!? like me -- Wikipedia [plus the whole Internet "link" technique] isn't too helpful. My own mind [such as it maybe still is?! ;-)] has enough trouble trying to stay ... how to call this? "Linear"? Without trying to call up a small piece of information and getting too many (for me at this moment any way) connecting suggestions/associations.

The Wikipedia approach to Owen Lattimore just calls up my own confused memories of Whittaker Chambers, typewriters, and pumpkins. But seeing I -- once "a morning person" -- am now a sometimes time-of-day-or-night "challenged" (i.e. "growing old") person I just thought I'd ?"chime in"? one more time here before closing down the computer for a bit.

Hoping to find some more China-related posts here next time I log on!

Thanks, everyone [;-)]

salonmarte

If I remember correctly, he was pre/anti pinyin in his language instruction.

Think about what an important and vast innovation pinyin was. I believe that children in China today learn pinyin before getting down to real business with their characters.

Thanks for the excellent post, which has inspired old schoolmates to make contact again. We started Chinese in the Army at the Defense Language Institute (East Coast) with texts in Yale romanization.

Matthew's Chinese Dictionary then was the best available, and that was in Wade-Giles. But once past the preliminary romanization stage and into Chinese characters, there was little need if any for "wading" into the mish-mash of romanization systems. So, avoid the problem by learning a few street name characters!

The pronounciation is another matter. In Taiwan, which uses traditional characters as opposed to simplified characters (nothing is easy), the children are helped in pronouncing characters by zhu-yin-fu-hao (bo, po, mo, fo...) ; ie, the little marks added to the characters to assist in sounding out--much like Hangul in Korean, or in Japanese often you see little hiragana attached to help pronounce the kanji.

But like training wheels, once you learn to ride a bicycle off they come.

Times change, people progress, but give me traditional Chinese characters any day over the simplified. [There is so much lost graphically in the transition, especially with classical texts.]

Can't say that a life long and incomplete study of Chinese has "paid off" in a material way, but it's something you can always come back to, and yet never completely conquer.

Cheers.

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dtxqwqr_19gjjvp8

This is an eye-opener on how the world will work. Because, surely Andrew, we know one thing..... the world, as you are coming to understand, Doesn't Work.

Just a thought, and a fascinating read.

I also studied Chinese in the 80's with the DeFrancis books. Green was all pinyin. Blue was Characters. From the start I never liked studying Chinese without the characters.

Recently I pulled out the Blue book to help me introduce my (half-Chinese) son to characters. He already has a good command of the language being born in Taiwan and having a Chinese mother. I was again impressed by how DeFrancis built the book up chapter by chapter, introducing key words and then reinforcing them over and over. Much better than the modern kids books my son gets from his classes in Chinatown...and it's Traditional characters. Boo Simplified! Though I'm sure he'll have to learn Simplified too, as did I.

Also it's charmingly anachronistic. Mr. Bai, what will you do with all of those writing brushes?

再見DeFrancis先生，謝謝您！

Maybe the Chinese department at my university was out of date, or maybe the books have just stood the test of time, but in the classes I took, only about 5 years ago, we used DeFrancis's books. I also read his "Fact & Fantasy" on my own. The books did use pinyin, so I'm not sure about an earlier commenter's note that he was anti-pinyin. However, they did use traditional characters, which are now out of date in the PRC.