A cognitive-interactive approach to Chinese characters learning: system design and development

Abstract

A solid knowledge of Chinese characters plays an important role in Chinese reading. Essentially, Chinese characters, a graphic- based orthographic rule, are much different from the words of an alphabetic language, such as English, French, etc. The uniqueness of Chinese characters make it is extremely difficult for most of the CFL/CSL learners no matter what their nationalities are. In this paper we developed a Chinese character learning system based on a cognitive-interactive perspective to help CFL/CSL learners learn Chinese characters. The results of a preliminary survey show that most of the surveyed CSL learners approved the learning system’s design rationale as well as made positive comments on the system learning effect upon their Chinese character knowledge construction.