A Survey On Chinese Character Learning Of The Students From Non-Chinese Cultural Circle

In this paper, we took three groups of the non-Chinese cultural circle students of the China Academy of Fine Arts for a survey about their Chinese character learning status. They are from intermediate level class, primary level class and beginners’class according to their overall Chinese proficiency. We design the survey on their Chinese learning background, the attitude toward the Chinese culture and Chinese characters, the teaching order of pinyin and Chinese characters, the requirements for reading and writing the Chinese characters, the orthographic awareness, the memory strategies of Chinese characters and the overall feeling of the Chinese character learning. The results showed that:the vast majority of students have a great interest in Chinese culture and Chinese characters, but still think that the Chinese characters are difficult to learn; the students generally want to learn Chinese characters after finishing learning pinyin; the requirement for reading and writing Chinese characters should be different:they’d like to read more than write; orthographic awareness and Chinese character memory strategies showed a normal distribution according to their Chinese proficiency level, that is, for the Intermediate students, most of them have a strong sense of orthography, and they use relatively effective Chinese memory strategies. In contrast, the orthographic awareness of students from primary or beginners’ classes, is mostly weak, and they use less efficient Chinese character memory strategies; a small part of the students give up the learning of Chinese characters if Chinese characters are too hard for them. Based on the results of the survey respectively, the author then made the following suggestions:teaching Chinese characters after finishing the learning of pinyin; setting different requirement for reading and writing ability; teaching Chinese characters by explaining its cultural origin; strengthening the orthographic awareness of Chinese characters; guiding the use of effective memory strategies for memorizing Chinese characters, learning from Schmidt ’attention’ theory to reduce the burden of memorizing Chinese characters.