Basics for Learning Chinese Characters
This set of materials is to accompany the chapters in the textbook entitled A Multimedia Course for Learning Chinese Characters by Prof. Der-lin Chao.
This textbook offers students a comprehensive course on the fundamentals of Chinese characters and strategies to master them.
In this set of materials, Prof. Chao introduces a unique pedagogy to teach and learn characters. This method has been implemented at Hunter College for the past two decades with proven results. The pedagogy lays out a comprehensive curriculum that goes hand-in-hand with developing oral skills where students first learn the basics about strokes and stroke order rules. Then, students learn the formation methods for characters and that the majority of them are meaning-sound component characters. 20 common radicals are introduced to provide students with a thorough understanding of all aspects of radicals so that later on, and students can acquire all 214 radicals on their own with a learning tool provided on the website.
In this set of materials, Prof. Chao introduces a unique pedagogy to teach and learn characters. This method has been implemented at Hunter College for the past two decades with proven results. The pedagogy lays out a comprehensive curriculum that goes hand-in-hand with developing oral skills where students first learn the basics about strokes and stroke order rules. Then, students learn the formation methods for characters and that the majority of them are meaning-sound component characters. 20 common radicals are introduced to provide students with a thorough understanding of all aspects of radicals so that later on, and students can acquire all 214 radicals on their own with a learning tool provided on the website.
Following these chapters, students are introduced to strategies for learning new characters and reviewing old characters.
Then, students will learn about the principles for simplifying characters.
Finally, students will learn about the most frequently used characters in printed works.
These characters are put together to form many words or shumianyu (written style Chinese).
Each chapter has two parts. The first part is the instructional page that explains the content of each topic using an animation that can be easily re-played along with the audio. The second part is exercises that are divided into beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. These exercises can help students to fully understand the content in the chapter.
Each chapter has two parts. The first part is the instructional page that explains the content of each topic using an animation that can be easily re-played along with the audio. The second part is exercises that are divided into beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. These exercises can help students to fully understand the content in the chapter.