dc.description.abstract | Because of the rise of Chinese market, there are more than 40 million foreigners learning Chinese around the world. Due to changes of social construction, in Taiwan, the number of spouses of foreign and mainland China have been growing from 230 thousand in 2002, to 440 thousand now. Amount these people, foreign spouses are about 140 thousand, and 90 thousand people have already acquired Taiwanese identity. This phenomenon shows that the demand of learning Chinese is getting more important. However, form and pronunciation of Chinese characters are complicated so that beginners are not easy to learn, especially the part of learning pronunciation. In fact, learning Chinese as a second language is harder than learning English as a second language. Chinese learners have to use Chinese phonetic symbols or other spelling method to help reading. Besides the sound of character, they also have to study form and meaning together. Such restrictions above delay the progress of learning. That is the reason why some experts intended to Latinized Chinese at the first of 20th.
Chinese characters have many kinds, including pictophonetic, ideographic, ideogrammic compounds, phono-semantic compounds, derivative cognates, and rebus characters, (collectively called Six Writings) in which pictophonetic characters mean the word that is composed by a phonetic element and a semantic complement. Therefore even you have not seen the word before, you can have a logical guess of the word’s pronunciation and meaning from its phonetic and semantic symbols. That is so-called 「有邊讀邊,沒邊念中間」. In fact, about 80 percent of Chinese characters are picto-phonetic characters. However, the main difficulty of this identification method is that the phonetic symbols only represent similar pronunciation, and the development between how the symbols influence the words’ pronunciation had not yet been studied. For example, 泡, 抱, 飽 these three words have similar pronunciation with the word 包, but how 包’s pronunciation influences and becomes these three words remains to be investigated.
The main objective of this essay is to find the important phonetic words, which can help Chinese learners learning characters’ pronunciation and the rules of pronunciation of Chinese phonetic words. This paper is divided into two parts.
First part of the discussion used proposed method “probability distribution comparison” to find the major picto-phonetic words in Chinese characters and sorting them by their significance, together with the rules, Chinese beginners can learn step by step by this arrangement. They will be able to learn a huge amount of other words and their pronunciation in a very short time. It will enhance the efficiency of learning Chinese characters’ pronunciation for Chinese beginners.
The second part focused on finding different traits of commonly used Chinese characters, and we use association rule mining to identify pronunciation rules of phonetic characters (such as radicals’ strokes). Moreover, we filter and organize the pronunciation rules from Chinese beginners, remaining only those easy to memorize. Our goal is to give a learning strategy which focusing on phonetic symbol teaching, in order to risen the learning curve. When learning a new Chinese character, together with association rules, students can not only learn that one word but also many different related words. In the long run, they can make the most use of E-technology learning.
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