Vintage Chinese Language Courses or Recordings

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Axon
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Vintage Chinese Language Courses or Recordings

Postby Axon » Thu Oct 12, 2017 7:52 am

Hi everyone,

I've been happy to read the writeups provided by collectors of vintage language courses on this forum. It seems that most courses in English that they've come across have been for European languages. I'd like to know, however, what the oldest audio courses for learning Chinese might be.

I know that Yuen Ren Chao / Zhao Yuanren / 赵元任 wrote A Mandarin Primer and published it with recordings in 1948. Could that have been the first one? You can listen to the audio here. You may note that it sounds a little different from modern Chinese courses.

As you may know, the current form of Standard Chinese was only decided upon in the 1950s. There were some attempts at creating a uniform pronunciation before that, the most interesting of which to me is now known as Lao Guoyin or Old National Pronunciation. On the Wikipedia page for Old National Pronunciation, there is a mention that Yuen Ren Chao and someone named Wang Pu (王璞) made recordings in 1920 and 1921, though I am rather certain that these were not intended as courses for foreigners but instead as model pronunciation for Chinese citizens.

Mandarin pronunciation before 1950 wasn't THAT different from today, but in very old recordings you can definitely hear something quite removed from modern speech. Here's Sun Yat-Sen.

Has anyone come across courses with audio for Chinese in a pre-Standard Mandarin era?
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Re: Vintage Chinese Language Courses or Recordings

Postby Axon » Thu Oct 12, 2017 9:36 am

I seem to have found Yuen Ren Chao's 1921 recording, or a portion of it.

http://www.ximalaya.com/49326674/sound/45190055/
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Re: Vintage Chinese Language Courses or Recordings

Postby Speakeasy » Thu Oct 12, 2017 12:07 pm

While I have never studied Chinese, the thought occurred to me that there might be a few useful discussion threads on this subject on the How-To-Learn-Any-Language (HTLAL) forum.

I have never mastered the Search Function of the HTLAL, which I understand has some interesting features. I typed "Vintage Chinese" into the G-Search function, which produced 0 zero results. On a hunch, I tried "Old Chinese" as my criterion, which provided a short list. I am not at all sure what distinction the members make between Classical Chinese and Old Chinese and whether any of this relates to the Vintage materials that you are looking for.

Old Chinese - HTLAL G-Search
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/search_form.asp?cx=partner-pub-2912224114831178%3Ach0jagxs7xl&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Old+Chinese%22&sa=Search&siteurl=how-to-learn-any-language.com%2Fforum%2Fsearch_form.asp&ref=how-to-learn-any-language.com%2Fe%2Findex.html&ss=10069j91351921j5
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Re: Vintage Chinese Language Courses or Recordings

Postby Axon » Thu Oct 12, 2017 1:06 pm

Speakeasy, thank you for searching! This thread was in fact started on his recommendation.

I've taken a look at the linked resources, and unfortunately didn't find what I was looking for. The timeline for Old and Middle Chinese is very, very long, stretching into the thousands of years, and thus well before any audio recording technology. There are many excellent resources for learning Classical Chinese, but the characters are usually pronounced as they would be in modern Mandarin - only a few brave souls commit to learning older, reconstructed pronunciations.

It seems that the oldest surviving phonograph records of any Chinese variety were made in 1902 and 1903 of various opera performances. And yet there are spoken word recordings from 1890 and earlier of English (and possibly other European languages). I guess it goes to show how different the world was at the time, that it took more than a decade for the technology to get to the Far East.
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Re: Vintage Chinese Language Courses or Recordings

Postby Daristani » Thu Oct 12, 2017 3:54 pm

Linguaphone produced a Chinese course with audio in the 1920s; I downloaded the books for it in PDF form a couple of years ago, and thought I had the audio as well, but don't seem to be able to find the audio at the moment. I'll keep looking and see what I come up with.
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Re: Vintage Chinese Language Courses or Recordings

Postby Speakeasy » Thu Oct 12, 2017 4:17 pm

As you seem to be very well-informed on the subject, I hesitate to offer any advice. Nevertheless, I suspect that, putting aside the collections that private collectors may have accumulated, the only substantial archives available would exist in large, well-funded institutions: but, how does one go about locating them? Perhaps the institutions listed below might be in a position to guide you.

Modern Language Association
https://www.mla.org/

The AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music
http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/index.html

University Language Resource Centers (LRC)
Numerous universities throughout the world have Language Resource Centers (LRC), a few of which possess substantial archives. Most often, the archives are available primarily to faculty, staff, and registered students whereas some of them provide limited access to the public. It would probably take someone with an advanced degree in Library Science to know how to locate and penetrate -- that is, speak the language of the librarians -- these bastions of higher learning, something that I have never been able to do.

University of Chicago
https://dma.uchicago.edu/about/about-digital-media-archive

Georgetown University
http://press.georgetown.edu/languages/about-georgetown-languages/our-mission

University of Michigan
https://lsa.umich.edu/lrc/language-learning/languages-michigan.html

University of Oxford
http://www.lang.ox.ac.uk/home

University Foreign Language Centers in USA
https://www.google.ca/search?q=University+Foreign+Language+Centers+in+USA&oq=University+Foreign+Language+Centers+in+USA&gs_l=psy-ab.3...60168.60168.0.61267.1.1.0.0.0.0.236.236.2-1.1.0....0...1..64.psy-ab..0.0.0....0.Er-1MSpOzio
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Re: Vintage Chinese Language Courses or Recordings

Postby snowflake » Thu Oct 12, 2017 4:23 pm

Axon wrote: Mandarin pronunciation before 1950 wasn't THAT different from today, but in very old recordings you can definitely hear something quite removed from modern speech. Here's Sun Yat-Sen.


I hear a Cantonese accent; Sun Yat-Sen was Cantonese.

I have some of Yuen Ren Chao' s materials, including recordings of him reading his translation of Alice in Wonderland. Language changes over time, especially spoken language. Am unsure what this thread is focusing on, especially since it switched to talking about old and middle Chinese.
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Re: Vintage Chinese Language Courses or Recordings

Postby Axon » Fri Oct 13, 2017 3:53 am

Daristani, thank you, that's exactly what I was looking for! Best of luck finding the audio.

Speakeasy, thank you again, I think you may be on to something with these university archives. I actually worked in my own university archives for two years, so I know their language, such as it is.

Snowflake, it's likely that you've heard more Cantonese-accented Mandarin than I have, but to me it sounds very different from modern Mandarin as spoken by someone from Guangdong. The way he says 世界, for instance, or 六, or the sentence 今天听到我的话.

You're absolutely right that spoken language changes over time, and that's exactly the point of this thread. If you went around China as Sun Yat-Sen was giving that speech, I'm sure lots of people could speak to you in Mandarin, but it would be many hundreds of slightly different Mandarins because there was no massive proliferation of Putonghua.

So during that time, what pronunciation was used as a model for foreigners? And how, if at all, has that model changed from then to now?
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Re: Vintage Chinese Language Courses or Recordings

Postby Axon » Fri Jun 07, 2019 3:59 am

I know everybody has been waiting these long years with bated breath, so I'm happy to report that I've found a couple of more resources of pre-1950 Mandarin recordings.

Here's the complete audio from the Mandarin Primer (1948), in an easy-to-view format, with some commentary and some user-created subtitles. Hopefully even those not studying Chinese will be able to appreciate Yuen Ren Chao's efforts, sitting in a recording studio alone and effortlessly switching between voices and dialects to perform many sides of a single conversation.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/av480684 ... 3532731143

Meanwhile, I believe another user has found the recordings from ca. 1920 I mentioned, and cut them up into helpful videos such as these:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/av218086 ... 3799933330

Searching for "老国音" on various English and Chinese sites comes up with more recordings than it did a few years ago, and I hope more people continue to unearth these bits of Chinese teaching history.
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Re: Vintage Chinese Language Courses or Recordings

Postby Flickserve » Fri Jun 07, 2019 10:10 am

Axon wrote:
Mandarin pronunciation before 1950 wasn't THAT different from today, but in very old recordings you can definitely hear something quite removed from modern speech. Here's Sun Yat-Sen.

Has anyone come across courses with audio for Chinese in a pre-Standard Mandarin era?

Had a listen. Don't take this as being Mandarin. It's heavily accented Cantonese.
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