2. The first most serious problem encountered in teaching Chinese through Chinese literature is, needless to say, the difficulty of the language. There is, of course, the general problem of its almost total unfamiliarity. Chinese is simply not commonly encountered in the American environment, and few American students are spontaneously attracted to studying it. For a native speaker of English to master Chinese sufficiently to enable him to read original Chinese literature and to do research in the field is, needless to say, a formidable task. It requires a far greater expenditure of time and effort than the achievement of a comparable degree of proficiency in almost any other major language of the world. The number of "contact hours" for proficiency in Chinese is likely several times the amount required for a comparable proficiency in French or Spanish. Graduate students, as a result, continue to be plagued by language problems even while they pursue advanced courses in their chosen discipline. In view of the difficulty of the language, we must be especially careful in selecting teaching materials and in our approaches to the problems encountered. From Winston L.Y. Yang, "Teaching Chinese Through Chinese Literature"