The Key to Learning Chinese Characters for Children

Chinese character is one of the characters that persisted for thousands of years. Chinese character is a writing structure with the longest recorded the longest usage and the largest number of users in the world. It records the development history of a huge nation and a splendid culture that lasted for thousands of years. Therefore, the teaching of Chinese characters is a pass that can never be bypassed in international Chinese education and teaching both at home and abroad. No matter how fluent a person speaks Chinese, if he doesn’t know Chinese characters, his understanding of Chinese culture will never be thorough and comprehensive.

In addition, the uniqueness of Chinese characters is very different from other writing characters, which makes it an eternal and intractable problem to learn Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are the foundation of the Chinese language. Children can cultivate their interest in Chinese characters from an early age. Let’s talk about the key to making children fall in love with learning Chinese characters.

1. How to make children fall in love with learning Chinese characters.

Every child is capable. All of them can learn and understand Chinese characters. However, their progress lies in two key points: learning methods, and concentration.

(1) Don’t regard literacy as learning.

“Learning” has a different connotation. When people hear this word, they immediately relate it to a task. Thus it motivates them for there is no fun.

(2) Characteristics of children’s literacy: Chinese characters are abstract paintings.

(3) Fun-based methods, such as mazes and games, are a good way to cultivate children’s concentration.

Multidimensional (multi-method) let children contact Chinese characters, such as:

Chinese characters can be regarded as a kind of thinking training because each Chinese character requires some level of critical thinking.

Take every Chinese character as a story,

Chinese characters can also be used as ballads to talk and sing,

You can also draw Chinese characters as pictures,

……

The children will not forget to read and understand the classical sentences they receive from reading. That allows them to create new words and practice writing. Literacy is an imperative aspect. No matter what age bracket you belong to, literacy will help you a lot. However, the traditional way of practice seems to be obsolete.  From childhood to adulthood, we all memorize by rote processing, and so did I. Now we don’t have to struggle as much. After all, we use multi-dimensional to understand new words, and once we understand them, we will never forget them.

2. In fact, every Chinese character can be used in such a multi-dimensional way.

(1) From simple to complex, lay a good foundation for learning Chinese characters. 

As we all know, Chinese characters have their own system and internal laws. In my opinion, teaching Chinese characters must be based on the characteristics of Chinese characters themselves. However, teachers must remain vigilant in abiding by the rules of pedagogy. The process of learning must remain. We still need to follow the “from less to more,” “from shallow to deep,” and “from simple to complex.” In addition, we must also follow the laws of psychology, respect students’ interests, hobbies, and the laws of memory and forgetting., It is possible to improve the quality of Chinese character teaching by creating opportunities for multiple senses to participate.

(2) Communication ability as the mainline, Pinyin, and Chinese characters. 

One of the important principles that teachers should follow is not to let the complicated writing of Chinese characters become an obstacle to Chinese learning. In order to achieve the goal of fluent literacy, the basics must remain. Therefore, teachers must inculcate of processing basic information. They must not ignore the basics like “greetings, thanks, good-bye” and other communicative sentences.

From the law of language learning, it is close to life, practical, and effective. However, from the perspective of Chinese character teaching, if students write “Hello, thank you, goodbye” at the beginning, we can’t say absolutely not, but it is inevitable that students will fear difficulties.

My suggestion is that at the beginning of learning Chinese, two distinct lines should be adopted: one is oral communication training with Pinyin as the tool, and the other is the introduction teaching of Chinese characters arranged according to the rules of Chinese characters.

Starting from the basic strokes, stroke order, and radicals, this paper focuses on recognizing a certain number of commonly used single characters for a period of time. After some progress, it proceeds to teach the meaning of the radical to the students. On this basis, it uses the known radicals to form a compound character. The method of changing from simple to complex is helpful for learners to form a whole psychological concept of Chinese characters.

In short, teachers can help students to establish the relationship between part of the structure and the overall shape and speed up the cognitive speed of Chinese characters. These factors will create favorable external psychological conditions for students, facilitate learning transfer, the psychological process of literacy of CCB, and improve the efficiency of Chinese character teaching. This is the key to letting children love learning Chinese characters!

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