Learning Chinese the Mackay Way: “Repetition, Repetition, Repetition,” What Can Be Accomplished in a Single Year and What Cannot

Abstract

[[abstract]]George Leslie Mackay's Diaries shed considerable light on his phenomenal life, ministry, and near-instantaneous grasp of Chinese, or Amoy. Is there anything to be learned from his example, Mackay claiming to master the Amoy dialect after only four months and simply by means of repetition, repetition, repetition? Curiously, Mackay credits McGowan's English and Chinese Dictionary of the Amoy Dialect as his text of choice in 1872. However, the grammar in question was not published until 1883, or ten years after the fact. And so, we should take with a grain of salt the idea that Mackay learned Chinese as quickly as he claims. Indeed, both the storyline and timeline borders on the fantastic in more ways than one. One cannot imagine any responsible teacher of Chinese for English Speakers attempting to follow Mackay's example and/or adapt Mackay’s method—oral repetition--to the classroom with any real hope of success. Mackay, like other Christian missionaries at the time, wrote a good deal of missionary propaganda, his Diaries in this instance a mythic representation of the "facts" surrounding his study of Chinese and thus an unrealistic characterization of what can be accomplished in a few months by any earnest Christian hoping to disseminate the Gospel message in late Victorian Formosa. There is no doubt that Mackay mastered the Amoy dialect and how he said he did. However, in response to the issue of how long it really took, his Dairies suggest it was, and as one would expect, a matter of years and not months