A Better Method for Learning Chinese Characters

30 minutes: The problem Current study methods Our study: method & results What we’ve built to fix the

problem Future efficacy studies

15 minutes: Questions, comments,

suggestions

Nick Winter Chinese, Mathematics, Computer Science

George Saines Cinema Studies and Economics

Scott Erickson Computer Science

Chinese is really hard to learn Speaking > Listening Writing > Reading

Basic literacy: 2000+ Full literacy: 4000-5000

5 characters a day ~550 characters a year learning through writing out character

sheets

Literature: more than 70+ methods Memorization isn’t well-respected Recent empirical research on

vocabulary acquisition via other means

Method our fellow students used:

Theory: current study methods don’t work and lead to poor long term retention.

How poor?

Test 1st, 2nd, and 3rd year Oberlin students

Administer “known” character test 85% participation

Sample sizes: 1st-semester: 30/35 students, 200/200

chars 3rd: 16/20, 150/727 5th: 5/5,

150/1161 Write character from definition, pinyin,

and example words’ pinyin ~9 seconds per character

39%!

1st-years 2nd-years 3rd-years

Score 62% 39% 38%

Std. Dev.

22% 9% 14%

Characters

123 / 200 284 / 727 441 / 1161

Not correlated with Number of strokes Recency of study Frequency of use

Easy long term review Instantly accessible practice No vocabulary management Efficient, active recall

www.skritter.com

How it works:

Pinyin and definition practice allow users to learn all aspects of prompt user-corrected definitions

Improved scheduling Japanese support

Contextual, level-appropriate sentences Teacher tools Mobile phone version

Fall 2009: outline how the study will be set up outline how we’ll gauge success we’re looking for institutions interested

in helping us perform the study

Thank you very much for your time.