Discussion of Online Teaching Strategies for Teaching Elementary Chinese Characters to Foreigners Based on Error Analyses

The expanding role of the Chinese language in international communications has become increasingly prominent as China’s comprehensive national power continues to grow, leading to a significant rise in the number of Chinese language learners. Since online teaching is not limited by time and space, its application is widespread. For beginners in the Chinese language, the Chinese characters are both a priority and a challenge. The “Chinese Character Classification,” also known as the “Six Writings,” is the earliest systematic theory of Chinese character structures, and teaching Chinese characters in categories based on the “Chinese Character Classification” is a method that fits the cognition of beginners. In order to teach Chinese characters in a targeted approach, based on the collection and analysis of the common errors of Chinese characters among beginners,(1) this paper proposes that(a) the intuitive method can be applied to teach pictographic characters, indicative characters, and associative compound characters in online teaching;(b) the inductive-deductive method of “basic characters to new characters” can be applied for the teaching of pictophonetic characters and associative compound characters;(c) the learning of character patterns should be approached in a whole-part-whole process, while importance should be attached to the suggestion of the frequency effect with a view to facilitating the online learning of Chinese characters for beginners. The aim of this paper is to provide some practical implications for the online teaching of Chinese characters to foreigners.