The European Catholic missionaries who reached China in the late 16th century were the first Westerners who tried to learn Chinese in a systematic way. The pioneers were two Italian Jesuit priests: Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci. They learnt Chinese with local tutors in the Portuguese colony of Macao, against the will of their brothers, who thought that they were wasting their time, trying to do the impossible. Indeed, without any grammar or dictionary, and with poor teachers who only spoke Southern dialects, it was a miracle that they learnt Chinese so well! The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci Ruggieri was able, with some help, to write a catechism in Chinese, and he even composed poems in Chinese. Ricci surpassed him: he is the author and translator, together with a number of Chinese Christian literati, of numerous works on subjects such as geometry, geography, morality, theology and so on. He also compiled a Chinese-Portuguese dictionary, never published. Another Jesuit, Nicolas Trigault, wrote a massive work in Chinese entitled The collection of sounds and writings of the Western scholars (1625), presenting to the Chinese public the Latin alphabet, while also offering the first system of "romanization" (i.e. a way to render Chinese sounds in Latin letters). How did these missionaries learn Chinese? Most of them thought that the Chinese language did not have grammatical rules, and that the only way to learn it was to be exposed to a good teacher, and to memorize sentences and patterns. In fact, this remained the way Westerners learnt Chinese for a long time, at least until the beginning of the 20th century. Such method was based on traditional Chinese pedagogy, which prized memorization of characters and of sentences extracted from the classics of Chinese literature. As a matter of fact, more experienced missionaries prepared simple conversation textbooks for the newly arrived recruits. Some 17th- and 18th-century teaching materials used by beginners have survived in the Vatican Library in Rome or in the French National Library in Paris: most of them consist of dialogues in spoken Chinese, usually between a Westerner and a curious Chinese. The Chinese asks many questions about the customs and strange things of Europe, and the Westerner, beside trying to impress him with the description of mechanical clocks, oil painting in three dimensions and the like, always tries to talk about Christianity.

The first Western grammar of Chinese was written in Latin by the Italian Jesuit Martino Martini in the mid-17th century, but was never published. In the latter part of the 17th century, however, missionaries from Spain (Dominicans, Augustinians and Franciscans) tried to fill the vacuum. Unlike the previous generation of Jesuit priests, these Spanish friars were bound to work not with the Chinese scholars, but among commoners. Thus they were interested in the spoken language, and not so much in the classical literature and the written classical language. They not only used dialogues, wrote dictionaries (of course by hand!), but finally were able to print a Spanish-language grammar of Chinese in Canton in 1703. Authored by Francisco Varo and Pedro de la Piñuela, the Arte de la lengua mandarina (Art of the mandarin language) was circulated mainly among missionaries in China, and maybe passed on to some interested merchants. Only few copies made it to Europe, and were avidly collected by linguists, who used (and at times plagiarized!) that knowledge to establish the basis for the modern study of Chinese in the West. We find a funny description of the best method to learn Chinese in a manuscript grammar prepared by the Augustinian monk José Villanueva towards the end of the 18th century: "What should a European do who wants to learn Chinese? He should put away the Chinese characters and start with the Chinese syllables written as European words and annotated with the proper accents. He should not trouble to learn many syllables, but learn to pronounce those he reads with fluency and without hesitation. He must try to find some Chinese who speak and understand correct Mandarin, and should speak and converse with him as much as possible... Then after having trained for four or five months he should take a Chinese book, written in Chinese characters without admixture of European words... He should grasp the Chinese-European dictionary and look up each character patiently, one by one, and assure himself calmly of its meaning, without fear, realizing that he is carrying his cross. No doubt he will forget one character while he is looking for another. But he should not give up, only go on and look it up for the second, the fourth, and the sixth time. Often he will feel horrified and it will appear to him impossible to learn the characters. In each character he will see a fierceful lion wanting to attack him. When he realizes that it is a paper lion, he will laugh. After two months or at most three the fearful lion will be transformed in a peaceful ox..." Today such method would not find much acceptance, and nevertheless, many who study Chinese indeed still "feel horrified" and in each Chinese character continue to see a fierceful lion wanting to attack them!

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The Paper Lion: Early Western Study of the Chinese Language