Hello all who have contributed to this discussion,
Recently i lamented with Ven Analayo about the difficulty of
learning Chinese. He responded that now, with the digital tools
available, it's 'kinderagten'.
Ok, we must put this in perspective, not all of us have Analayo's
skill with languages. But point taken. The grammar is quite simple,
and the basics can easily be grasped with a few weeks with a
introduction to Chinese.
The characters are now little problem, as we can use software (Dr
Eye or Babylon i know of) that will instantly recognize each
character and give the dictionary definition; Babylon even promises
to speak each character for you (though this function doesn't seem
to work for Chinese yet).
The other problem is that typically those interested in Buddhist
Chinese come from a modern Chinese background, so for them the
language is difficult. But for one coming from a Pali background,
such as myself, reading the Agamas is fairly easy. Since the
material is almost always just a slight variation on the Pali, we
can readily identify the idioms and vocabulary, and straight away
can start to make sense of the majority of the material.
Of course, this falls short of a good command of the language,
which, as with all languages, can only come with many years' study
and familiarity. But if we are primarily interested in checking out
the alternative perspective shone on the suttas/vinaya by the other
traditions, we can do many things quite readily. And since we are
working with material that is inspiring, we learn quickly. We also
have the advantage of the clever pedagogical methods of the suttas,
such as the repetitions-with-variations, a technique that is used
consciously by modern language teachers for precisely this reason.
So don't despair!
The sutta-central project has as one of it's main aims overcoming
the arbitrary boundaries imposed on our Dhamma studies by the
accidents of language. So it might be a good idea for us to include
some language-studies material, especially designed to facilitate
the entry into hidden realms of Buddhist teachings. This might be
quite simple, just some practical tips and directions to existing
resources. But we do need some more serious, systematic work on
Buddhist Chinese, especially so we can understand the very different
idioms used by different Chinese translators.