Standard Hanzi Lists in the Chinese Education System

[adam2073]

The Chinese education system incorporates a huge amount of character studying. During the 6 years of primary school, thousands of characters are learned, a trend which continues into high school before a college entrance examination with upwards of 5,000 characters needed. The Chinese government have published standards which give lists of the characters to be taught (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Commonly_Used_Characters_in_Modern_Chinese).

 

My question if this: If you wanted to learn Chinese characters as the Chinese do, what order would you learn to write them in? A Chinese friend once told me at one stage when he was younger he needed to do writing in an examination using 500 characters he had learned. I assume there are lists of characters to be taught in 1st grade, 2nd grade etc and then build on from there but I can't find anything by searching in English. Can someone with better Chinese help out?

[li3wei1]

From

Shu, H.; Chen, X.; Anderson, R.C.; Wu, N.; Xuan, Y. “Properties of School Chinese: Implications for Learning to Read”, in Child Development. Jan/Feb2003, Vol. 74 Issue 1, p27-47.:

 

The properties of the 2,570 Chinese characters explicitly taught in Chinese elementary schools were

systematically investigated, including types of characters, visual complexity, spatial structure, phonetic

regularity and consistency, semantic transparency, independent and bound components, and phonetic and

semantic families. Among the findings are that the visual complexity, phonetic regularity, and semantic

transparency of the Chinese characters taught in elementary school increase from the early grades to the later

grades: Characters introduced in the 1st or 2nd grade typically contain fewer strokes, but are less likely to be

regular or transparent, than characters introduced in the 5th or 6th grade. The inverse relation holds when

characters are stratified by frequency. Low-frequency characters tend to be visually complex, phonetically

regular, and semantically transparent whereas high-frequency characters tend to be the opposite. Combined

with other findings, the analysis suggests that written Chinese has a logic that children can understand and use.

 

 

In their bibliography, they list Elementary Education Teaching and Research Center, Beijing Education and Science Institute. (1996). Elementary school textbooks. Beijing, China: Beijing Publishers, as the source of the list they used.

[gato]

See these vocab lists and earlier thread about this topic:

 

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4bb4841901009b1z.html

小学语文一到六年级生字（小学语文生字表1-6年级）

 

http://wenku.baidu.com/view/827ef996dd88d0d233d46a92.html

人​教​版​小​学​语​文​生​字​表​大​全

 

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/21172-does-it-take-longer-for-chinese-children-to-attain-reading-comprehension/?hl=%2Bcharacters+%2Btextbook#comment-171668

Does it take longer for Chinese children to attain reading comprehension?

[adam2073]

Great. Now if we can just get the matching textbooks they use we can become Chinese.

[roddy]

If only...

 

Our member querido is a big fan of these. The publishers, People's Education Press used to have a lot of material online, not sure if that's still the case, the links I have no longer work. 

[gato]

Still the case, Roddy.  PEP's 语文 textbooks for 1st through 6th grade are available online here: http://www.pep.com.cn/xiaoyu/jiaoshi/tbjx/kbjiaocai/

[roddy]

Welcome to the site, Adam. I think you'll agree we're proving useful ;-)

[adam2073]

Thanks for the personal welcome. Yes you guys are very helpful and it's great to know there is a thriving bubbling community here. Hopefully I can contribute!