Issues in teaching Chinese characters and strategies for foreign learners outside the Chinese character culture circle
Issues in teaching Chinese characters and strategies for foreign learners outside the Chinese character culture circle

Summary/Abstract: Learning Chinese is far from an easy task and acquiring Chinese characters is probably the greatest challenge. Many foreign students outside the Chinese Character Culture Circle, beginners in particular, give up learning Chinese characters because of the ideographic system. This system embraces phonology, glyphs and semantic meaning, which are completely different from alphabetic writing. What makes things worse is that TCCF has been ignored for a long time in TCFL. TCFL started to develop in China in the early 1950s, and that involved teaching some simple characters including strokes, the order of strokes and structural analysis. There were no independent character textbooks for foreigners. The content concentrating on teaching characters did not play a leading role in materials for teaching Chinese. Furthermore, most teachers paid little attention to, or neglected character teaching and training, due to the lack of linguistic knowledge.

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