Chinese Character Breakthrough

One of the most striking difficulties for foreigners to learn Chinese is Chinese characters; there are both objective and subjective reasons for it. Chinese, as the only morpheme character, is far different from other characters. All characters are recording languages, but the language unit is different. English is recording phoneme; Japanese Kana is recording syllable, Chinese is recording morpheme. Dozens of letters are required for recording the phoneme or the syllable of a language; however, for recording the Chinese morpheme, thousands of characters are required. Thousands of morphemes may lead to diversity and complexity in terms of structure and strokes, as well as imperfect phonetic system. They are supposed to be main objective reasons to make leaming Chinese characters difficult. From subjective perspective, the law of Chinese characters is still not discovered fully, in addition. the pedagogy of Chinese characters is not very applicable. This causes difficulty to Team Chinese characters. In fact, if the learners understand the law of Chinese characters, three thousand common Chinese characters are not difficult to Team.
The aim of this book is systematically to introduce the inherent law of Chinese characters and the Chinese character knowledge to foreign learners. We hope it can foster learners' ability to leam Chinese characters an their own.
We start our introduction from the basic strokes, the rule of stroke order, components and radicals, and focus an the structure of the pictographic characters, associative compound characters and the idea-sound characters. We try to deepen students' understanding of the phonographic and ideographic structure of Chinese characters, to develop their „Chinese character sense“ and the ability of self-study by learning a large number of typical characters of radicals, idea-components and sound-components. The leamers' competency to learn characters is: 1. identification of an idea-sound character and guess the meaning and the sound of a character; 2. understanding the new characters by connecting the old ones; 3. looking up a dictionary; 4. making correct word phrases and sentences. Besides leaming the character structural system, the students must use characters everyday. The System of the „character-+word--+sentence--> text“ to learn Chinese characters is recommended.
With English translation, this textbook of Chinese Character Breakthough is compiled for the beginners. There are 61 lessons and 1063 vocabulary entries that cover 800 level A characters in The Syllabus of Chinese Words and Characters. Over 2000 words, 800 sentences, and 61 items of Chinese characters knowledge are included as well in this book. The learners can achieve the goal of having a good command of Chinese characters and Mandarin. Exercise book provides diversified interesting exercises for practice Chinese characters.