Optimization On The Selection Of Primary Chinese Characters

Teaching of Chinese characters is one of the most important parts of the teaching Chinese as a foreign language. However, both the research and the practice on Chinese character teaching always stay in a relative laggard situation during these years. "Syllabus of Graded Words and Characters for Chinese Proficiency" is a specification and guideline to clarify the Chinese grade, which is generated by carefully selection above those words and characters used in the teaching of Chinese. It's also the important reference for the lesson design, book design, teaching method selection and teaching result verification of the teaching Chinese as foreign language. However, the widely used "Syllabus of Graded Words and Characters for Chinese Proficiency" for now only takes the necessary of learning the Chinese words into consideration while neglects the special property and characterize of Chinese characters as well as omits the comprehensive consideration on the acquisition and rules when learning the Chinese characters. In order to classify which characters are most suitable for foreign students' course especially during their primary study stage, all of the pronounce, shape and meaning of Chinese characters should be regarded as the key factors, in addition to the frequency of Chinese words and characters. This paper presents a novel approach to provide 800 the most suitable primary level Chinese characters to foreign students during their initial stage of learning Chinese. These 800 Chinese characters are obtained by enumerate analyzing on 3500 frequently used Chinese characters from "contemporary Chinese frequently used characters list". During the investigation, several factors derived from Chinese characters themselves, such as stroke, phonogram, structure categories, component part, are all covered and analyzed in the procedure. The goal of this paper is to find a reasonable scheme to integrate the traditional theory of Chinese characters and contemporary practice on teaching Chinese as foreign language after comparing the selected 800 Chinese characters with the 800 A level Chinese character shown in "Syllabus of Graded Words and Characters for Chinese Proficiency". This method is also hopefully utilized to deliver thorough consideration on more factors as supplement and improvement for current content in "Syllabus of Graded Words and Characters for Chinese Proficiency".