Ann Arbor, Michigan – A faculty member at the University of Michigan has drawn upon 17th-century European ideas about the Chinese language in developing software to help students learn to read one of the most important and popular languages in the world today.
The name of the program, Clavis Sinica, is a Latin term for “Key to Chinese” that refers to a 330 year-old Western dream of “unlocking”
David Porter, who teaches eighteenth-century literature and has published a book on European ideas about China during that period, first came up with the idea for the program while living in China and struggling to find some way of organizing the hundreds of vocabulary words he was trying to learn. Inspired by the ideas of European scholars he was researching for his dissertation, he created a computer program to help map the relations among the thousands of distinct Chinese characters.
In 2002, he began marketing the program as a learning tool, borrowing the name “Clavis Sinica” to pay homage to his 17th-century predecessors. He has continued to develop the software since then, and it has been widely adopted for use in Chinese language programs across the country, including those at Yale, Cornell, Stanford, Duke, the United Nations, and the US Air Force Academy. The small company Porter founded to develop and market the software (http://www.clavisinica.com) recently announced the release of a major new upgrade in version 4.0, which combines a bilingual dictionary of 40,000 words, a Chinese text reader, flashcards tool, and audio recordings created by Porter’s Chinese wife Lani.
The growing importance of China’s role on the world stage has led to rapidly increasing enrollments in Chinese language courses in colleges, high schools, and even elementary schools throughout the US. With a mastery of over 3,000 distinct characters being necessary just to read a Chinese newspaper, the students in these courses will have a hard road ahead. Some of them, Porter, hopes, will find in Clavis Sinica a helpful learning tool, and in its unusual history a reminder of the early origins of our long-standing fascination with China and its languages.
