The Research Of Character Radical Teaching And Cognitive Processing Of Characters

Chinese characters are considered to be one of the most difficult aspects of teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language. In this paper we research how Chinese character radicals system is taught in Russian schools. The purpose of our research is to find out how Russian students perceive Chinese characters, and the different learning techniques they use (on the example of students from two Russian schools). Both schools have a significant representativeness within the system of Chinese Language education in Russia. The questionnaires were distributed among50students of different level of proficiency in these two schools. In this questionnaire the students had to summarize and describe their learning experience, describe how they perceive Chinese characters, demonstrate their knowledge of character radicals, and whether or not they can use this knowledge in recognizing the unfamiliar characters. The results of this questionnaire have revealed the Russian system of Chinese character education imbalance. Chinese characters teaching in universities is concentrated on the structural analysis of Chinese characters and lets the students learn most of the radicals, while the middle school, though still teaching the structure of the Chinese character, does not emphasize the importance of character radicals. Russian students use three types of learning techniques in their study of Chinese characters:1)analyze the strokes in the character, and then write it many times;2)analyze the radical structure of the character and then use association to memorize the character;3)combination of the mechanical and analytical techniques.