The Foreign Service Journal, April 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2014 39 The life and work of Herbert Allen Giles offer insights for many Foreign Service members—particularly those who embark on the kind of linguistic journey Giles undertook as a young diplomat. BY PHEBE XU GRAY FEATURE H erbert Allen Giles (1845-1935), per- haps best known for his association with the Wade-Giles transliteration system, was a British Foreign Service officer who spent 25 years in China. After retiring from diplomacy, he became the second professor of Chi- nese at Cambridge University. Giles initially took Chinese as a job requirement. But after mastering the language for that purpose, he pioneered the disci- pline of Chinese studies and was a prolific author of numerous textbooks and articles on China’s language, literature, culture, history, arts and philosophy. It would be unfair to compare Giles with today’s U.S. Foreign Service officers, since he spent his entire diplomatic career in China and Taiwan. Nevertheless, his story proves that it is not Phebe Xu Gray is a language and culture instructor in the East Asian and Pacific language department at the Foreign Service Institute. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not repre- sent those of FSI or the U.S. Department of State. HOWH.A. GILES LEARNEDCHINESE only possible for an adult to learn Chinese, but to be remarkably successful. With that in mind, here are some possible lessons for FSOs preparing for language-designated positions. Discover Creative Ways to Learn the Language After completing his studies at the Charter School in Oxford, Giles passed the competitive examination to be a student inter- preter for the British Foreign Service. Immediately after arriving in China in 1867 as a 22-year-old, he distinguished himself by his untraditional approach to learning the language. There were very few textbooks available for Westerners to learn Chinese at that time. Giles was not entirely satisfied with the recommended textbook, Yu Yan Zi Er Ji , considering it as an “ill-arranged and pedantic primer”—an assessment that would become a major point of contention between Giles and its author, Sir Thomas Wade. So he set out to learn what the Chinese were reading and how their children attained literacy. Giles purchased books on the street, and started by memo- rizing a classic primer, The Three Character Classic . He then taught himself to read Chinese literature by using dictionaries