With the development of China, more and more foreigners come to learn Chinese in China. Thus, the Chinese teaching program is becoming more and more important in China. However, the question of how to improve the efficiency of teaching characters to foreigners has bothered the Chinese scholars who have tried their best to find a solution to solve the problem. Though many debates and research have been conducted of the features of the Chinese characters, it is still hard to describe the Chinese character acquisition of the foreign learners completely and exactly.
There is not much research on the strategies of teaching Chinese characters in China by now. Jiang Xin and Zhao Guo from Beijing Language and Culture University conducted a survey whose objects were overseas students on the elementary level. The survey was kind of questionnaire survey. They settled down the items of teaching strategies and evaluated the actual situation of each circumstance. After the summary, six strategies were summarized, namely strategies of strokes, pronunciation and meaning, character pattern, induction, review and application. They found that the application strategy was of great help to improve the learning Chinese characters, that character pattern strategy was not helpful to learn Chinese and that then effect of phonogram learning was more sensitive than the non- phonogram learning.
From the structure, the form, the pronunciation and meaning of the Chinese characters, several strategies for learning will be concluded. The first is the character pattern strategy. Recent research on psychological aspect of cognition language characters reveals that distinguish between ideographs and phonograms influences the processing of psychology. The second is the semantic and phonetic connection strategy. The radicals points to the meaning of the word. The third is the literal meaning connection strategy, which means the connection with the similar-meaning words together to teach the foreign students who study Chinese in China. The fourth is the associative characters analysis strategy. The fifth is the literacy order strategy. The principle of the strategy is to teach the students words which have less stokes first, then the words that have more strokes.
During the process of teaching, the strategies mentioned above should be used properly according to the levels of individual students. The teachers should adopt suitable strategy to meet the needs of each student in the real teaching course.