Copyright 2006 © The Miktam of Chinese International Inc.

2.Introduction of CCC
3.Teaching Methodology of CCC
4.Characteristics of CCC Teaching
5.CCC FAQ

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1.1 Characteristics of Chinese Characters
1.1.1 Pictographs
1.1.2 Great Repetitiveness
1.1.3 Four Different Physiological Stages For Children
1.2 Learning Character From Context
1.3 Four Features In Traditional Chinese Character Learning Along
The History For Over 2600 Years:
1.3.1 Phonological Localization
1.3.2 Four Characters Per Phrase
1.3.3 Knowledge Of All Subjects
1.3.3 No Repetition In Using Characters

1.1 Characteristics of Chinese Characters
1.1.1 Pictographs
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Original Picture
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Irregular Graphs or Lines
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5 Normative Strokes:
 Horizontal Stroke ( 一 )
 Vertical Stroke ( 丨 )
 Left falling Stroke ( 丿 )
 Right falling and Point Stroke ( 丶 )
 Turning Stroke （乛）

1.1.1 Pictographs
→ 木
(tree)
→ 禾
(cereal)
→ 川
(river)
→
泉
(fountain)
→ 网
(net) → 勺
(spoon)
→ 燕
(swallow)
→
鱼
(fish)
→ 舟
(boat)
→ 车
(vehicle)
It is often said that every Chinese character is a picture, but only a couple hundreds are actual pictographs. Some of these are still interpretable, such as tree
木
,but most are now written in a way that is hard to immediately discern their meaning. Such as horse
馬 or bird
鳥
. There are also a very small number of simple ideographs which suggest an abstract idea directly, like one
一
. All the rest of Chinese characters are combinations of these pictographs and simple ideographs.

1.1.2 Great Repetitiveness
“ 的、一、是、
在、不、了”
10%
“ 的”
4.1%
28.41%
20%
First 50
Characters
First 19
Characters
Modern Chinese
Characters
The statistics analysis shows the distribution of usage frequency of 11.08 million characters sampled from the social science and natural science materials which totally contain 138 million characters by Chinese State Standard Bureau.

1.1.2 Great Repetitiveness (cont)
The team of Standard Chinese Character of Beijing 748 Project selected 7075 modern articles which contain more than 21.62 million characters.
3900 characters left
1%
99% are written by
2400 characters
6300 Chinese characters found
Therefore, experts believe that reading and writing should not be an issue when people master these most frequently used 2400 Chinese characters
.

1.1.3 Four Different Physiological Stages For Children
1. Hearing development (listen to the pronunciation): 1-3 years old
2. Sight development (pattern recognizing) : 4-6 years old
3. Coordination capability development (writing): 7-13 years old
4.
Abstract thinking development (meaning): through a person’s whole life but mostly before 25 years old.

 Memorize better
 Deepen the understanding of character meaning
 Too slow to build up literacy.
 To master 2540 Chinese characters when finishing elementary school
( requirement of The Syllabus by China Education
Ministry), it takes about 6 years by learning reading materials of more than 300,000 characters for existing Chinese school students to obtain such basic character amount.
 Far behind the children intelligence development.

1.3 Four Features in Traditional Chinese Character
Learning Along The History For Over 2600 Years
Traditional
Children
Enlightenm ent
Teaching
Materials
Zhou Dynasty ： Shi Zhou Pian (2600 years ago)
Qin Dynasty ： Cang Jie Pian , Ai Li Pian, Fan Jiang Pian
(2300 years ago)
West Han ： Ji Jiu Pian (2000 years ago)
N&S Dynasty ： Thousand character poem (1700 years ago)
Tang Dynasty ： Meng Xue (1300 years ago)
Song Dynasty: Three Characters Verse, Hundred Family
Names (1000 years ago)
Ming Dynasty ： Long Wen Bian Ying (600 years ago)
Qing Dynasty ： Xiao Xue Yun Yu (200~300 years ago)
So called “Three Hundred Thousand” :Three Character Verse,
Hundred Family Names and Thousand Character Poem

1.3.1 Feature One: Phonological Localization
The phonics of Chinese characters is one pronunciation for each character and every pronunciation has certain rhyme. Because of the rhyme, the sentences of Chinese could be placed in a matrix by rhyme order.
For example: The Book of Songs, Han Fu, Tang Poem, Song Verse and Yuan Opera drove Chinese language to the highest artistic frontier. And the rhyme of Chinese character plays a decisive role in it. Without rhyme, the door of understanding ancient Chinese culture could not be opened. So cultivating the language sense of rhyme is the most important lesson on Chinese character learning.
This is the reason that most children enlightenment teaching materials are written in rhyme.
According to modern psychological study, rhymed language is the oldest and most effective memorization method. Many tribes carried on their history by poetry, the rhymed language.

1.3.2 Feature Two: Four Characters Per Phrase
Generally, the literacy enlightenment textbooks are composed with four characters per phrase, sometimes three characters. 9 of the 10 authoritative textbooks above are with four characters for each sentence. Only Three Characters Verse is with three characters for one sentence. Why use four characters to make up one sentence? There are some reasons:
Language learning for children is a course of vocal training. Because their sound controlling muscles haven’t been fully developed, and it is not recommended to have more than 4 syllables in each sentence. Study shows that the integrity of the sentence could be quite different for children of 6 or 7 years old to speak with the syllables more than 5 or less than 4.
Four characters per sentence is a popular way to form a phrase in Chinese.
Influenced by the level and oblique tones, as well as rhyme, phrases formed by
Chinese characters increase by geometric series. In the early period, there was usually one character per word. As the language develops, two characters per word got more popular. Then a word/phrase composed by four characters has become dominant. Chinese Idiom Dictionary collects this kind of phrases, which is also the essence of Chinese language.

1.3.3 Feature Three: Knowledge of All Subjects
All ancient literacy enlightenment teaching materials were composed according to knowledge classification.
They cover and contain all the major subjects, mainly including astronomy, geography, ethic, great (philosophic) way, morality, history, agriculture, sacrifice, education and etc.
Students could obtain the knowledge benefiting their whole life in the course of character learning.
In formality, ancient Chinese learnt characters within context too. But it is quite different from how modern Chinese do.

1.3.4 Feature Four: Non Repetition in Character Usage
In “Three Hundred Thousand”, non repeated characters take up to 70% of the total character amount
There are 1616 characters in Three Characters Verse, 576 characters in Hundred
Family Names and 1000 characters in Thousand Character Poem. There are 3192 characters in the “Three Hundred Thousand” in total, but the ones with no repeated usage are about 2200.
Ineffective repetitiveness of modern teaching materials are more than 90%. There is no comparison between modern Chinese teaching materials with “Three Hundred
Thousand” regarding the intensity of non repeated characters.
Why not Thousand Character Poem?
Thousand Character Poem was composed by one thousand characters with no character repetition. When you finish this text, you will learn one thousand characters. It was the only teaching material which highly integrate several character learning methods, such as intensive character learning, context character learning, rhymed character learning, classified character learning and etc. Although Thousand Character Poem is very good, with age, the knowledge and information it expressed are out of date, and most phrases have no clear meaning. It could not be used as modern character learning material. From the end of Qing dynasty, Thousand Character Poem has no longer been used as character learning material. Hence, the peculiar fast character learning method it represents had disappeared.

1.Brief Introduction of Chinese
Character Learning Methodology
3.Teaching Methodology of CCC
4.Teaching Features of CCC
5.FAQ on CCC

2.Introduction of CCC
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Chinese Character Canon is a super Chinese character learning material with all the traditional features of “no repeated characters”; “rhymed phrases”;“ four characters per phrase”, as well as
“up-to-date knowledge in all subjects”.
CCC is a great achievement of curriculum research project by the Language Research Institute of
PRC State Education Ministry.
It is the Designated Chinese Text Book For
Oversea Chinese by Oversea Chinese Federation of PRC.

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CCC is composed of 4,000 most frequently used
Chinese characters with no repetition.
It screened and compiled 3755 basic characters from
Chinese Character National Standard Font I; 2905 frequently used characters from HSK (Chinese
Proficiency Test ) syllabus; and 3500 frequently used characters issued by State Council of PRC.
4,000 CCC characters cover 99.81% of the characters used in natural and social science articles, and cover all the regular used characters in the whole life of a native Chinese speaker.

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“Rhyme” is the key to open the door of ancient Chinese culture and also is a kind of the oldest and most efficient way of memorization.
The following features make CCC easy to memorize:
 Four characters per phrase
 Eight characters per rhyme
 Rhymed phrases with level and oblique tones
 Parallelism

2.3 Mini-Encyclopedia
50 Subjects of Up-to-date Knowledge Included:
Astronomy, Geography, Ethic, Great Way, History, Politics, Economy,
Education, Science & Technology, Sports, Architecture, Landscape, Animals,
Flowers & Plants, Fruits & Trees, and etc.
More than 150 historical allusions
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One character could refer to an object,
One phrase could mean an event,
One sentence could refer to an allusion,
One section could mean a period of history.
It will facilitate readers to obtain the scientific and cultural knowledge which could be beneficial to their whole life.

2.4 Inherited All Methodologies of Character Learning
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Student’s Learning Procedure:
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First, listening to the pronunciation,
Second, distinguishing the pattern,
Then, understanding the meaning.
Combined with Traditional Chinese Teaching
Sequence: sentence / word / character
CCC project team has also introduced many interesting games to facilitate students in learning characters and make the learning process more fun.

2.6 High Efficiency in Character Learning
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Great difficulty in composing brings great efficiency in learning
Student with normal intelligence could finish learning in 6 months
6 Months vs. 6 Years
Notarized record shows some students of 5 years old finished all 4 volumes of CCC in 4 months, the consolidation rate is up to 74.6%, which is 15-20 times faster than the character learning speed in existing school system.
To master 2540 Chinese characters when finishing elementary school
( requirement of The Syllabus by China Education Ministry) takes about 6 YEARS by learning reading materials of more than 300,000 characters for existing Chinese school students.

Listening….
Reading…
Talking….
ENGLISH
Only 26 letters and phonics rules to remember…
Writing…

Listening…
Talking…
中文好难哦 …
???? …
Too hard to learn
Chinese…
CHINESE
中文
2000+ characters to remember
…….
Reading…
Writing…

Listening… Help from
中华字经
Chinese
Character
Canon
Talking…
CHINESE
乾坤有序
宇宙无疆
星辰密布
斗柄指航
……..
Reading…
Now I can read
Chinese
Writing…
Typing…

1.Brief Introduction of Chinese
Character Learning Methodology
2.Introduction of CCC
4.Characteristics of CCC Teaching
5.FAQ on CCC

3. Four Steps in CCC Teaching Methodology
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The feature of children recognition is firstly overall input, which means that in each class session, grasp the exciting point of children in the first several minutes to quickly input teaching content into children’s brain.
Different skills to lead the reading will facilitate the recitation:
 Ordinary speed
 Variable rhythm
 Skipping reading and etc.
The pronunciation sequence in every eight characters following a rhyme will help to make the recitation more fun and enjoyable.

3.2 Ruminate
Like the word “Ruminate” indicates, after overall input of all the content, teacher should help the students deepen the impression of the patterns of all the characters learned in their mind by repeated reviewing.
Keep in mind the following rules:
 Four characters a phrase/sentence
 Two characters a word
 One character a fixed pronunciation

3.3 Transfer
 This is the recognition practice which help the students to recognize characters by moving them away from the original context.
 CCC project developers have developed character strips, cards and some other teaching kits to assist teachers to achieve this goal.

3.4 Integration
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Integration means to compose characters into sentences or paragraphs for students to read when they have mastered certain amount of characters.
This is the final goal of character learning - Let students be able to read as soon as possible.
CCC project developers have prepared some supplementary reading materials: Synchronized
Reading Textbook and Comprehensive Reading
Textbook. Please refer to the presentation of CCC products.

1.Brief Introduction of Chinese
Character Learning Methodology
2.Introduction of CCC
3.Teaching Methodology of CCC
5.FAQ on CCC

4.1 Passionate Teaching
4.2 Motivated Environment
4.3 Accurate Pronunciation
4.4 Phonic Order
4.5
Class Schedule
4.6
Quantity Control
4.7
Diversify Teaching
4.8
Sufficient Practice
4.9
Reference Data

4.1 Passionate Teaching

4.2 Motivated Environment

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4.3 Accurate Pronunciation
Both teachers and students should pronounce each character accurately. Teachers should listen to the tape or CD to get correct pronunciation before a class. During the class, the teacher should pay attention to student’s pronunciation and see whether it is accurate or not. If any character mispronounced, please correct right away.
Do not ignore any mistake in pronunciation.
 For teachers who have accent in speaking Chinese, please use the teaching kits provided by MOCI, such as Talking
Whiteboard, Learning Machine, and Magic Pen (please refer to the presentation of CCC products.

4.4 Phonic Order

4.5 Class Schedule
Make different plans for different ages of students based on the goal. For example, if you have a goal to finish learning 1000 Chinese characters in 2 months, the corresponding monthly plan and weekly plan should be scheduled, such as how many new lessons in a week, the content for each new lesson, and when to review. And then teacher should teach according to the plan scheduled. Of course you can leave some margins to add or drop content depending on the situation in each class.

4.6 Quantity Control
Character amount taught in each lesson can be quite different according to different age groups of students. But the learning potential of students should be brought into full play. For example, 4-6 years old children can learn 16~24 characters in one lesson. But for the children with better intelligence development, they could learn up to 32 characters.
Of course, this depends on the learning environment and student’s talent. In certain circumstances, when students are fuzzy, the character amount taught should be relatively reduced. A teacher should pay particular attention to children’s learning interest to control the character quantity.

4.7 Diversify Teaching
CCC teaching needs to be diversified in reading, reciting, recognizing and reviewing. The ways of reciting include plain tones (read in even speed) or rhythmic movement. The ways of reading and recognizing are using character cards, character strips or the multimedia shows. The way of reviewing mainly is games while competition can be introduced. Because review is usually the last part of a lesson and students could feel tired or bored at that point, competition could motivate them.

Practice usually involves:
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 students follow teacher to recite sentence by sentence teacher leads the first sentence and students follow up the next sentence
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 reverse reading sentences from bottom up skip reading every other sentence, etc.
Several iterations will make the practice sufficient.
It is recommended to memorize 12 rows in 30 minutes per day. Gifted students can increase the memorization amount but should not exceed 48 rows.
Experiment indicates that students under 4 years old should reduce memorization amount relatively and students above 5 years old should increase the amount.

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Recite the characters learned 1-2 times before sleeping at night and after getting up in the next morning. Every 2 pages are a section for 5 days study and make the 5th day to review. After the completion of each chapter, take 2 days as period review. And after the completion of whole volume, please reserve 5 days for the general review.
Recite characters when highly motivated, which has the learning efficiency 10 times higher than mechanical memorizing.
Each CCC class should be less than 1 hour a day. Please prevent the wrong approach of making students immersed in a sea of characters.
Recite and pronounce correctly, and then learn to identify each character. Practice until students can read the whole sentences smoothly. Don’t hurry into the step of “Transfer” – individual character recognition.

4.9 Reference Data
Memorization Amount and Time Required:
To memorize: 100 characters takes about 9 minutes;
200 characters takes about 24 minutes;
500 characters takes about 65 minutes;
1,000 characters takes about 165 minutes.
Influence of Learning Intensity On Memorization Efficiency:
When learning intensity reaches:
150%, students can recall 81.9% after 4 hours;
100%, students can recall 64.8% after 4 hours;
33%, students can recall 42.7% after 4 hours
For example, if a paragraph of text can be memorized after four times of reading, two times more reading would make the intensity goes up to 150%, and that could make students recall more. But when the recitation times are over 150%, the efficiency will decrease instead.

4.9 Reference Data (Cont)
Interval for Review:
Psychologist Ebbinghaus proved that when memorizing a paragraph of text,
41.8% forgotten after 20 minutes;
55.8% forgotten after one hour;
62.4% forgotten after 9 hours;
66.3% forgotten after 1 day;
72.2% forgotten after 2 days;
74.6% forgotten after 6 days;
78.9% forgotten after 1 month.
Based on this theory, we can conclude that review should be carried out before the content is forgotten. Generally, the content learnt in the morning should be reviewed once in the afternoon and before sleeping respectively, once after getting up in the next day, once after 3 days, and once after 1 month. And then the materials memorized usually would not be forgotten.

1.Brief Introduction of CCC Methodology
2.Introduction of Chinese Character
Canon
3.Teaching Methodology of CCC
4.Characteristics of CCC Teaching
5.FAQ on Chinese Character Canon

5.FAQ of CCC
5.1 Why difficult characters are used in CCC?
5.2 Student can recognize the characters in the rhymed text, but could not recognize them when the characters appear in other places. What to do?
5.3 How ｍ any characters should be learnt before starting reading? How to combine character learning with reading practice?
5.4 Even though students may memorize many characters in a short time, how to prevent them from forgetting afterward?
5.5 Why should frequently used characters be learnt firstly?
5.6 What is “Locality Association”?
5.7 Why many different colors for CCC characters? What do they stand for?
5.8 Can teenagers above 13 years old or grown-ups use CCC to learn characters?
5.9 What is the difference between CCC and Three Character Verse?
5.10 What is “Synchronous Reading” of CCC?
5.11 What is “Comprehensive Reading” of CCC?
5.12 Why not teach Phonics (Pinyin) first?
5.13 Why no illustrations in CCC text?

5.1 Why does CCC use difficult characters?
Regarding to character recognition difficulties, there are no differences among the characters. But there are differences regarding to writing. Students look at the characters just like look at pictures. The simplicity or complexity of the character strokes has no influence on making students feel easy or not to recognize.
Characters with more strokes provide more memorization information and facilitate the differentiation to students. The characters frequently used may be easily recognized, but may not be easy to write. Writing is not the same as recognition. For example, “ 舞” (dance) is a frequently used character, but it is difficult to write. “ 卞”
(impetuous) is easy to write, but not a frequently used character. Character learning should start from frequently used characters, and writing should begin with characters with less strokes.

5.2 Student can recognize the characters in the rhymed text, but could not recognize them when the characters appear in other places. What to do?
This is normal, especially at the beginning of learning. The “Transfer” practice is one of the four steps in CCC learning “Synchronous
Reading” and character cards/strips are all to cultivate a student’s “Transfer” ability. By plenty of practice and continuous review, this issue will be solved gradually.

5.3 How ｍ any characters should be learnt before starting reading? How to combine character learning with reading practice?
Reading practice can be started at the first lesson of CCC. Utilize the text book “Synchronous Reading” to practice the characters just learned. After mastering the first 400 characters, students can read some easy primer materials, such as short children’s songs with 2 or 4 sentences; headlines in newspapers, etc. Reading and character learning can be beneficial to each other. After mastering
1000 characters, students can start the independent reading practice with the text books of “Comprehensive Reading”. After mastering 2000 characters and finishing the four volumes of
“Comprehensive Reading”, students should be able to read freely.

5.4 Even though students may memorize many characters in a short time, how to prevent them from forgetting afterward?
Character memorizing is not the goal but a way to reading.
Reading capability is the final purpose of character learning.
There are 2500 frequently used characters out of 4000 characters in CCC. It requires 2000 characters to reach independent reading ability. Character recognizing and reading practice should be combined through out the learning process. Once the basic vocabulary built up, reading is much easier and enjoyable. And once a person gains the free reading ability, the commonly used characters would not be easily forgotten.

5.5 Why should the frequently used characters be learnt firstly?
The essence of CCC character learning is to help students to be able to read as quickly as possible. When a person masters 400 of the most frequently used characters, he/she should be able to do some preliminary reading. When a person masters 1000 of the frequently used characters, he/she could understand more than 70% content of any newspapers and books. Therefore, learning the frequently used characters first is the short-cut for student to quickly gain reading ability.

5.6 What is locality association?
Overall input is the first step toward the goal of independent reading. Because of the overall input, the rhymed text reading is like singing a song. It is easy for learners to memorize the pattern and location of every character in the text. Locality association in subconscious helps student on quick and efficient character recognition and memorization.

CCC characters are divided into 6 levels by their usage frequency based on statistics analysis.
The Level One is in red, total 800 characters.
The Level Two is in pink, total 804 characters.
The Level Three is in purple, total 601 characters.
The Level Four is in scarlet, total 705 characters.
The Level Five is in green, total 595 characters.
The Level Six is in blue, total 500 characters.
Students are required to master the level 1-3 of characters and know the level 4-6 characters.

Yes! The composition of CCC uses adult language. It is suitable for people of any age.
CCC project team provides the Commentary of CCC. The Chinese-English bilingual version of the commentary will be published soon. It will help the non-heritage teenagers or grown-ups understand the meanings of the characters, phrases and sentences of CCC.

“Three Character Verse" was composed with rhyme in level and oblique tones and three characters per phrase. It is an ancient enlightenment text book emphasizing on ethic education.
CCC is with four characters per phrase, covering 50 subjects of up-to-date knowledge and no repeated characters. “Three Character Verse" emphasizes on moral norm of words; while "Chinese Character Canon" covers a very comprehensive aspect of knowledge and places more weight on characters' recognition, and the method of reciting from memory.

“Synchronous Reading” is supplementary reading material of
CCC. CCC contains 50 subjects of knowledge which are the
50 lessons of the textbook. Corresponding to the 50 subjects,
“Synchronous Reading” also contains 50 lessons. In each lesson, “Synchronous Reading” contains some frequently used vocabularies, phrases, sentences and short stories on the subject with the CCC characters already learnt.
“Synchronous Reading” helps students review and consolidate the characters learnt, and at the same time cultivates and trains their pre-reading capability.
Combining “Synchronous Reading” in the course of CCC learning, the consolidation rate of character recognition will be increased greatly.

Compared to “Synchronous Reading”, “Comprehensive
Reading” is for advanced reading practice after students finish learning CCC volume I and II. It is to train and check student’s systematic and independent reading capability.
There are 300 articles with more than 300 thousand characters compiled into 4 volumes by the order of complexity. All articles were carefully selected and they pave the road to the free reading. With the completion of each volume, a student’s reading ability jumps to a higher level. Once all four volumes are finished, a student should have mastered all the reading skills for free reading.

5.12 Why not learn Pinyin first?
There are about 2500 languages in the world. Languages with different natures have different learning methodologies which are not interchangable. Originally, there was no phonics or Pinyin for Chinese language in the history . The alphabetic language systems dominate the world and its impact on modern Chinese language is significant. The learning methodology of Chinese language strayed away from its original path and fell into dilemma.
English is “phonetic language” while Chinese is “hieroglyphic language”.
Influenced by English, modern Chinese introduced phonics (Pin Yin) to Chinese language. But Chinese characters has little to do with phonics (Pinyin). Teaching
Chinese characters with English’s teaching methodology would certainly bring some problems.
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Here are the advantages and disadvantages of Pinyin:
Advantages: Enable students to pronounce any character familiar or not familiar, easy for index search, and more options for Chinese typing, etc.
 Disadvantages: Students pay more attention on Pinyin than on the characters which makes them rely heavily on Pinyin for reading. For text without Pinyin, they would not be able to recognize the characters even though they may have learnt them by Pinyin. Therefore learning Pinyin first may acturaly hinder the accumulation of vocabulary and reading ability.

Some believes that it is more efficient to learn characters with illustration. While this may be true for some language systems, it does not fit in every language system.
Because Chinese characters are “hieroglyphic composed”, they are literally pictures. By adding illustrations beside characters, 90% of student’s attention will be distracted, which actually reduces the learning efficiency. For the supplementary reading materials of “Synchronous Reading” and
“Comprehensive Reading”, illustrations were added to make the reading practice more fun and enjoyable.