Thousand Faces of Chinese Characters in a Thousand Learners’ Eyes

Copyright: © 2016 Michelle R. Lee

Chinese is ranked as one of the top 3 most difficult languages to learn in the world. A big “credit” goes to the intricacy of Chinese characters. A Chinese character can be as simple as 人 (meaning a person or people). It can be as sophisticated as 爨 (meaning the cooking stove or the act of cooking), which seems bizarre even for native speakers. Among the most frequently used 3500 Chinese characters, over 90% are compound semantic-phonetic characters. Any character among this category has a radical, which is the semantic component, indicating the character’s associated meaning category, and a phonetic component providing clues to associate pronunciation.

In a regular Chinese lecture, we can tell the students the above information about Chinese characters. However, the information students obtained from lecture-based learning may not transfer to language proficiency. Instead, designing active learning and peer learning experiences can help students achieve more successful Chinese language learning outcomes.

Processing Characters is the Biggest Hurdle in Chinese Language Learning

At NYU Shanghai [1], our overseas students are blessed with an immersive language environment for mastering Chinese. However, for our freshmen students who just embark on their Chinese language learning journey, learning Chinese characters poses the greatest challenge as I noticed in my teaching and their Chinese learning experiences.

When it comes to ways of teaching Chinese characters, we educators often use some of the following approaches: endless writing exercises for building muscle memory; recitation of radicals, and phonetic components that are regarded as the “small bricks for a skyscraper” in learning the Chinese language; lecturing about the etymology of the characters, and so on. These lecture-based approaches are proven to be effective, but I wonder if there are better ways to achieve the visionary goal of active learning? The extensive journey of learning characters can be lonely, so maybe a platform, a community, and persistent guidance and companionship can be surprisingly helpful, as well as a good source of inspiration and motivation.

Building the I Got One Platform- Active Learning for Processing Chinese Characters

Inspired by students’ creativity and unique perspectives on interpreting and processing the Chinese characters, I built the I Got One website (wp.nyu.edu/igotone, accessible with NYU ID) and started to collect and document my students’ ideas. Over a year, the website has now grown into an online community with over 1000 entries on 628 Chinese characters. Above is a screenshot of I Got One’s home page. Below, I want to show you some examples of my students’ entries about their strategies for processing Chinese characters.

1. “This character looks like an hourglass. Therefore, time is money and you can only get money by WORKING.” — Tony K.’s entry for the character “工”
2. “The upper left part looks like a plus and a negative sign, so it represents BOTH results in math.” — Frida S.’s entry for the character “都”
3. “Almost like the word ME, but it’s broken, so we need to LOOK FOR the broken part.” — Linda T.’s entry for the character “找”
4. “When you take a really cool PHOTO you say it is FIRE.” — Anubis W.’s entry for the character “照”
5. “This one helps me remember pronunciation as well. The right looks like a B so I always think BanaNA, so THAT banaNA.” — Joshua C.’s entry for the character “那”

The 5 entries above come from 5 students in my Elementary Chinese I class in fall 2019 when they were just two weeks into the class. They come from different countries like the U.S., Mexico, and Finland. Some of them had only been in China for less than a month when they came up with those ideas. From their descriptions, we can notice that my Chinese learners are more inclined to apply visual and aural features of the characters and make (pop) cultural references when they learn characters. Instead, they rarely refer to the traditional semantic-phonetic approaches that Chinese natives use and traditional Chinese learning textbooks draw on.

Developing Learners’ Metacognition on Chinese Characters

Over time, this platform has grown into a multi-cultural community where students share their strategies in connection with their own cultural and educational background.

Students are seen, heard, and quoted in a variety of scenarios, which further motivate continuous contributions. They find it fun and intellectually challenged to be involved in this online learning community.

Let’s take one of our most zealous contributors, Joshua C., as an example. I observed that Joshua inductively incorporated the traditional semantic-phonetic approach, which was taught in lectures, with his unique strategies of interpreting characters. Below are 5 entries in which Joshua applied the semantic-phonetic approach so naturally that four out of the five entries mentioned at least one radical.

1. “It is a person radical so the guy is leaning on the tree to REST.” — Entry for the character “休”
2. “The left side is a hand and the right side on top looks 音 and the bottom is 女, but it kind of looks like someone is CATCHING another person.” — Entry for the character “接”
3. “This is a stretch but hear me out, it has a tree radical so exTREEme and the other part look like a B so BE exTREEme.” — Entry for the character “极”
4. “The character has a grass radical and the grass is green and so is money, therefore you SPEND money.” — Entry for the character “花”
5. “It’s the walking radical which looks like a man on a road and the rest of the character is part of a 对 so its like correct/yes he can PASS.” — Entry for the character “过”

Cultivating Peer Learning within and beyond the Classroom

As the initiator and “manager” of this project, I realized from day one that it is impossible to ensure that all my students can maintain their language learning persistence. I need to find a way to inspire them and create positive peer influences just like learning in a physical classroom naturally holds.

Based on my students’ input entries on the platform, I began to increasingly incorporate this practice in my teaching and course components. The scenarios that I applied include the following:

1. I use the entries from earlier classes to introduce the new characters as a warm-up activity for a new teaching session
2. I use entries on the I Got One platform as prompts for the assignments and encourage my students to contribute to I Got One
3. During the periodical review classes, students team up and compete in a trivia game. Students look at their peers’ entries, they guess the meaning of those character in teams, and they write the answers out on the whiteboard
4. In review sessions, I guide the students on the strategies of different entries their peers used
5. I offer students tiny bonus points on their written exams if they can write out the characters with the entries that I selected from the platform

The I Got One platform also enables contributors to connect across time and locations and interact with each other. Here is one example of one student’s input replied by another student on the character 找.

Some Concluding Thoughts

I believe that learning is a process of getting to know yourself better: to know how you think, how you process new information, and how you turn new information into knowledge. It can be all in a black box inside your own brain, or alternatively, you can share your thinking with a broader learner community around you. In the case of my students, by sharing their own strategies of processing Chinese characters, they started to connect with more readers, followers, and even fans via the I Got One platform. In the long run, finding support in a community can sustain students’ motivation for active learning — which is the ultimate goal!

Looking ahead, I am planning on a new project about sharing these character learning strategies on social media and engaging audiences from a wider crowd beyond NYU Shanghai.

Note: [1] NYU Shanghai is a Sino-US university established in 2013 that embraces liberal arts education with 50% Chinese students and 50% internationals in the student body. NYU Shanghai is one of the three degree-granting campuses along with the Washington Square Park campus and NYU Abu Dhabi in NYU’s global network.

Jing Chai is a Senior Language Lecturer at NYU Shanghai. She has been teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages for more than eight years. Her teaching style can be described as active, immersive, communicative, and with a focus on community-engaged learning. In addition to the level-based courses, she has also developed language learning through documentary films, community children reading companionship, city-walks, immersive out-of-city trips, etc. She also shares a great passion for incorporating modern technologies into language teaching. She has been the main contributor to the Chinese online courses provided at NYU Shanghai. She is a firm believer in intercultural communication and active learning.