Most people think Chinese language is based on both characters and words because both of them can be regarded as the units of making up the sentences. In ancient Chinese language, most so-called words are monosyllabic and one character was one word. However, in modern Chinese, the disyllabic words are developed and hold the dominant position and characters become the morpheme of making up words. Usually, Chinese language is a kind of typical ideographic characters and each character is corresponding with one certain morpheme. And the Chinese morphemes have strong ability of word formation.

Therefore, if the students are familiar with the Chinese morphemes and word formation methods, they can make full use of the limited Chinese characters to expand the vocabulary. When foreigners learn Mandarin, reading exercise and listening practice are directly related to words. The main purpose of learning Chinesecharacters is to expand the vocabulary. During this process, the issue of proportion of words and characters should be considered.

According to the information from the vocabulary level outline and Chinese character level outline, the number of four levels’ Chinese characters is 2905 while that of the words is 8822, with the percentage of one to 3.037. Among those words and characters, there are 800 characters and 1033 words of the first level, about one to 1.9. Many Chinese language teaching materials at home and abroad are based on words and the proportion of words and characters are basically the same.

At present, the proportion of Chinese characters and words are low in the Chinese language teaching materials for foreigners which are based on words. Therefore, it is not in correspondence with the actual situation of Chinese language, which will obviously limit the students‘ reading skill and seriously affect the teaching efficiency. According to the data, even the students who study in Mandarin learning course acquire the whole 11 thousand high-efficiency words, it can only covers 90% reading materials. There is still great distance to understand the media articles totally.

Therefore, it is proper to limit the number of Chinese characters need to be acquired around 2500, which is correspondence with the application of Chinese characters and also the actual teaching situation. Many overseas students who have learned Chinese for four or five years still fail to understand some newspapers articles. The key of changing this situation is to change the materials compiling model and learning model.