Usage Of Mnemonics For Learning Chinese Characters By Russian Students

Chinese characters learning has alsways been a challenge, especially for learners from Western countries. To find an effective approach and solve this problem seems to be very important task for teachers of Chinese language.In this thesis we investigate the effectiveness of usage of mnemonic techniques, that are used by most of profecional mnemonists who participate in World Memory Championship. If this tecniques help them to memorize a lot of information and keep it for a long period of time, maybe it may as well help us to memorize a vast amount of characters we need to grasp while learning Chinese. So in this thesis we use an experiment and the following interview to find out whether so called the Art of Memory can actually improve our learning of chacters or not.The paper contains six parts.The first part introduces the background of this investigation and its meaning. In recent years the Memory Championship started to become more and more popular in different countries. All participants claim to have an ordinary memory, even though they can display really astonishing results during the course of this memory competition. The secret of their superior memory is-they say-a better usage of their memory features. In other words they use mnemonics. The usage of it-we believe-can help us to memorize Chinese characters as well.The second part tells about the results of previous investigations and researches made in the same field. The author refers to quite a few researches investigating the learning characters, learning strategies etc. After that he tells us about researches on memory, the history and implementation of mnemonics.The third part is the process of the research. In order to investigate the topic we conducted the experiment to find out how effective the techniques might be for learning Chinese characters. It includes the main goals, the subject and the content of this experiment.The fourth and fifth parts are findings we got through the experiment and the interview that followed. The interview is used to back up the experimental results, since the number of participants was not quite enough.The sixth part is the conclusion. The main points of each part were summarized here. The author gave some recommendations to teaching Chinese as a second language, as well as pointed out some shortcomings of this research.