Show the beauty of Chinese characters and expand the new way of teaching

As a self-originated writing system with a long history, Chinese characters have gone through a long process of development, reflecting the profound accumulation of Chinese culture. Mastering Chinese characters is the key to understanding Chinese culture. Overseas Chinese learners have both a consensus and a feeling that it is not easy to learn Chinese characters. How to teach Chinese characters so that overseas Chinese learners can quickly master Chinese characters is also one of the challenges faced by international Chinese educators.

It is the basis and the focus of teaching

Yang Wenbo, Chinese Director of the Confucius Institute phuket at Prince Songkhla University in Thailand, has years of experience in teaching Chinese characters. He believes that understanding Chinese characters helps the world to understand China and Chinese culture. Therefore, the teaching of Chinese characters is both the foundation and the focus of international Chinese education. "Mastering Chinese characters is the foundation of learning Chinese. If the foundation is not solid, the improvement of students' Chinese level will be affected. In the eyes of foreign students, Chinese characters have complex structures and many strokes. There are many polysyllabic and polysemy characters in Chinese characters, which makes teaching Chinese characters one of the difficulties in international Chinese education."

Zhou Jian, a professor at Jinan University and the author of "Cultural Codes in Chinese Characters", said the charm of Chinese characters lies not only in their unique form, but also in the large amount of cultural information they contain, which reflects the way of thinking of our ancestors from different aspects.

Deng Meng, a teacher at Hanyuan Chinese School in Dusseldorf, Germany, once taught Chinese in a Chinese middle school in China. In her opinion, the teaching of Chinese characters in international Chinese education is unique. "Teaching Chinese characters is an important part of overseas Chinese teaching. The teaching level of Chinese characters directly affects students' Chinese language level and their understanding of Chinese civilization. Nowadays, many overseas Chinese schools are paying more and more attention to the teaching of Chinese characters. For example, Hanyuan Chinese School offers calligraphy courses to teach Chinese and let students understand the structure of Chinese characters. From student feedback, the results are good."

What are the difficulties in teaching Chinese characters

As the teachers and experts mentioned above, the importance of teaching Chinese characters is self-evident, and the difficulty of teaching Chinese characters is undeniable, learning pinyin is also important. 

What is the difficulty of teaching Chinese characters for overseas Chinese learners? Deng meng believes that, on the one hand, Chinese characters are ideograms, a combination of form, sound and meaning, which are very different from other phonetic characters. On the other hand, the large number of Chinese characters and the complex structure order, such as "flint" and "brook", make it more difficult for students to correctly identify and write Chinese characters.

Zhou jian's feeling is that foreign students are used to writing in the combination of letters, and it is difficult for them to get used to Chinese characters, which consist of strokes and parts. At the beginning of learning Chinese, it seems not difficult for students to memorize some common sentences with the help of pinyin, but it is difficult for them to memorize and memorize Chinese characters. This puts forward the corresponding request to the teacher and teaching.

According to the analysis of his own teaching experience, Yang Wenbo thinks that in the initial teaching of Chinese characters, the teaching focus is mainly on the "sound" and "shape" of Chinese characters, and the difficulty is "shape". For example, Thai students as the object of teaching, because Thai language also has tones, so it is not difficult for Thai students to read Chinese characters in the early learning. What is difficult is the understanding of Chinese character "form", which is embodied as "hard to recognize" and "hard to write". "Thai characters are quite round, which is quite different from the Chinese character 'square block', and the learning of stroke order, components and other structural units in the early stage also makes it more difficult for students to read Chinese characters."

Yang wenbo said that with the in-depth learning of Chinese characters, the difficulty in teaching becomes "meaning". At this time, the "sound close word" and "shape close word" in the vocabulary will increase the difficulty of learning.

Teaching has its own magic

In the eyes of many overseas Chinese learners, the unique charm of Chinese characters is the main reason that attracts them to study and explore Chinese characters. How to stimulate the interest of overseas Chinese learners in learning Chinese characters and keep it going, instead of being afraid of difficulties, is a difficult problem that international Chinese educators have been trying to solve.

In 2007, Danhua Culture and Education Center in the Netherlands introduced "Chinese Character Classic" and "Grade Chinese Characters", and started teaching with "new ideas". "The new idea of teaching is' fast literacy, read ahead '. "Students learning Chinese for the first time don't rely on Hanyu Pinyin to learn to read, but on breaking the barrier in a short time." In danhua culture and Education center "Chinese character classics" class has seven years of teaching experience hu Suijuan teacher said.

In order to make the process of learning Chinese more interesting, Hu suijuan designed a teaching framework for freshmen to learn Chinese easily. Under this framework, Hu Suijuan listed the specific teaching steps and even detailed teaching games to be adopted.

Deng meng's experience is that in the teaching of Chinese characters, we can start from the shape to understand the evolution of Chinese characters. "For example, the meaning of the word 'Hugh', after explaining 'Sue', I will use vivid pictures to guide students to make associations and, based on this, guide students to understand the meaning of the word 'Hugh'. In this way, students not only deepen their memory of glyphs and meanings, but also increase their interest in learning." Deng Meng said.

Li Bitao, founder of Tongle Chinese School in Seattle, told us that tongle Has developed a set of "classical high-frequency character learning methods" to improve students' literacy efficiency. "For example, we selected 60 high-frequency words from the classic the University, and it was easy for children to remember them when they repeated the classic. In addition, I follow the principle of 'vivid image and relevance' to explain each Chinese character with vivid, straightforward and easy-to-understand language and actions."

Compared with students in Overseas Chinese schools, Yang wenbo teaches at an older age. He reminded that in the initial teaching of Chinese characters, teachers can use part of the pictograph notes video, throw a brick to attract jade, alleviate students' fear of difficulty; At the same time, with the help of these videos, we should also pay attention to the "degree", so as not to give students the illusion that all Chinese characters are "picture characters".