Chinese character education
sinogram of modern use in accordance with traditions
Chinese character education is the teaching and learning of Chinese characters. When written Chinese appeared in social communication, Chinese character teaching came into being. From ancient times to the present, the teaching of Chinese characters has always been the focus of Chinese language teaching.
The following is an introduction to the historical development of Chinese character education, modern native language Chinese character education, foreign language Chinese character education, teaching methods for Chinese character reading and writing, computer-assisted Chinese character teaching, as well as a comparison between Chinese character and alphabetic writing.
Methods during antiquity
In ancient times, research on Chinese character teaching focused on the preparation of various centralized literacy textbooks and dictionaries. Among them, the ones with greater impact include:
Western Zhou dynasty: Shizhoupian (史籀篇, written in big seal script, 827–782 BCE)
Qin dynasty: Cangjiepian (仓颉篇, small seal script, 220 BCE)
Western Han dynasty: Jijiupian (急就篇, clerical script, around 40 BCE)
Southern and Northern dynasties: Thousand Character Classic (千字文, regular script, 502–549)
Song dynasty: Hundred Family Surnames (百家姓, regular script, 960–1279)
Song dynasty: Three Character Classic (三字经, regular script, 13th century).
Starting from the Song dynasty, the three books of "Three Character Classic", "Hundred Family Surnames" and "Thousand Character Classic" developed into a set of teaching materials, collectively called "Three Hundred Thousand" (三百千, about 2,000 different characters), which were used for over 1000 years until the end of the Qing dynasty, and still have a certain influence today. "Three Hundred Thousand" is arranged in rhyme form to make it catchy and easy to remember. Another influential literacy textbook is "Wenzi Mengqiu" (文字蒙求) compiled for children by the Qing dynasty writer Wang Jun, which contains 2,049 characters.
These ancient literacy textbooks have two important characteristics:
1.
The public source identifies “Chinese character education” as sinogram of modern use in accordance with traditions. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chinese, character and education.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chinese character education” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.