Yanmei Zhang, Huimin Xu, Zhan Lv, Chenchen Zhu, Zixin Lin, Liuyi Kuang, Xinyu He, Hui Li, Xiarui Cheng

Zhan Lv

29 May 2023

Character volume, Character category, Character order, Coverage, Kanji Level Syllabus.

This study investigates and analyzes the character category, character volume, and character frequency of the four volumes of the international Chinese education textbook Developing Chinese (2nd Edition) in the intermediate and advanced levels. And the study also finds that the textbooks focus on difficulty enhancement in volume and category. In terms of character selection, they choose to teach characters with fewer strokes and simpler forms first. However, the amount of characters used between adjacent levels is not satisfactory; some characters have a low recall rate, and the selection of characters is not completely in accordance with the Kanji Level Syllabus. On this basis, this paper advocates that the selection of characters for international Chinese education materials should be based on high-frequency characters, commonly-used characters and characters with simple strokes, while focusing on improving the recurrence rate of Chinese characters.

© 2023, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license