Ideal order for introducing characters

[li3wei1]

In another thread, there was a bit of discussion about two different approaches to teaching characters and designing textbooks:

1) the usage approach, which is essentially to start with the most frequently encountered characters and only introduce characters that you'll be working with and practicing, and

2) the structural approach, which is to introduce characters in radical groups (presumably within each group you'd start with the most frequently used)

There's a new book coming out, which you can preview here, that appears to use the second approach but also throws in a lot of emphasis on phonetic groupings, i.e. groups of characters that share phonetic components. This makes some sense, because something like 95% of characters are pictophonetic.

I can certainly see the attraction of the second and third approaches at later stages of learning, maybe after the first year when you've got a foundation of vocabulary to work with, but I would argue that the first approach is best for the first year.

I'd be interested to hear other peoples thoughts/experiences.

[lechuan]

I think Tuttle's Learning Chinese Characters accomplishes both quite well. Character's are introduced roughly in frequency order, including any prerequisite radical, and grouped by similar phonetics/radicals. William McNaughton similarly does this in "Reading and Writing Chinese".

[Silent]

I don't believe there is an ideal order for introducing characters. As what is ideal is personal and depends on the circumstances and priorities.

The structural approach is far from perfect as in theory it might mean you're learning characters that are very rare. The frequency approach is broken because there is not such a thing as "the" frequency. A tourist travelling in China will encounter quite different vocabulary then someone who studies at home with the aim to learn Chinese for use in a business environment who in turn will encounter different vocabulary from some-one with a chinese spouse.

It is definitely good to have a clue about character structure, but if you have the choice I'ld say learn the characters _you_ are most likely to encounter/usefull to you. For the tourist that may be menu's and signs, for the student that may very well be the textbook used etc.

[Takeshi]

I had learnt characters before I had started learning Chinese because I was learning Japanese before. So the first characters I learnt were like 一、二、三、四、etc or like 月、火、水、etc.

It was a long time ago so when I started learning Japanese, so I can't remember very clearly, but I think "Japanese learning" and "character learning" were pretty much separate fields, especially at the beginning levels. So I would learn basic Japanese words and sentences, but maybe I wouldn't learn how to write their characters if the characters were difficult (though I think the book showed them, but we'd read from the furigana on top). At the same time, there would be a different kanji book that would go through teaching you characters from something like the structural method, whether or not you'd use them so often.

This worked out pretty well for me, because then by the time I decided to learn Chinese, I already "knew" characters, so it was trivial for me to just learn common Chinese words and what their characters were whether the character was complicated or not. (Indeed I did not /know/ all the characters used in Chinese; some very common characters in Chinese like 你 or 哪 or 嗎 I had never heard of in Japanese, but a knowledge of "characters" allows you to see these characters once or twice and easily remember them.)

I think the Japanese way of teaching it is a pretty nice way to go about it, but I'm not sure how that would work out in the context of Chinese learning, because Chinese has no kana so you can't just "ignore" the character and only learn the word if the character is too hard. I certainly could not imagine myself learning characters through "the first method" outlined in the first post; it would be too hard.

[Sobria-Ebritas]

你好！

The introduction to the book which li3wei1´s links refers to does a lot of sense to me. I study Chinese as a hobby. After quite a long time studying the characters arranged by radicals, one day I suddenly turned my attention to its other components , and the whole thing became much more interesting and rewarding. For example, after learning such a common character as 是 [shì], I found it relatively easy to learn four more, namely 提 [tí], 题 [tí], 堤 [dī], and 匙 [shi]. Of course, knowing very well the most frequent radicals and some basic phonetics was of great help.

So now I keep track of the characters I learn organizing them by its phonetics components. For instance:

616 采 [cǎi]

961 彩 [cǎi]

2151 踩 [cǎi]

3175 睬 [cǎi]

852 菜 [cài]

*3725 釉 [yòu] (<由 yóu)

The numbers correspond to the (relative) frequency; and the asterisk (*) indicates that in the following character 采 it is not a phonetic component. In fact it is the radical, the phonetic being 由 yóu.

One more example:

169 比 [bǐ]

839 毕 [bì]

2570 毙 [bì]

==== 坒 [bì] (v. 坒)

509 批 [pī]

2253 屁 [pì]

(v. 坒) indicates that this character functions as a phonetic in at least one character (陛 [bì]).

The phonetic-structural approach seems to be widely used in China for teaching characters. They use a special kind of dictionary as a reference. You can see what they look like following these links:

http://books.google.com/books?id=4_rlThuXxI0C&source=gbs_navlinks_s

http://www.amazon.cn/%E5%80%92%E5%BA%8F%E7%8E%B0%E4%BB%A3%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD%E5%AD%97%E5%85%B8/dp/B0011AF4F4#reader_B0011AF4F4

[hedwards]

I like Dr. Hoenig's ordering system. He's taking the roughly 2200 most commonly used characters and ordered them roughly by complexity and placing similar characters together. It's not as scholarly as some other approaches, but it's quicker in some ways as you're learning related characters at the same time.

The main downside is that he's ignoring stroke order and focusing mainly on recognition, but I've had good luck with it so far.

I combine that with an Anki deck of radicals and just looking at all the hanzi I can find, which honestly is everywhere here in China. I've gotten to the point over the last few months of being able to guess a lot of the ones I haven't yet learned for meaning and rough pronunciation.

There may be a better way, but I've found this one to be a reasonable way, but I haven't really been pushing myself hard yet.