A Study on the Teaching of Chinese Characters Memorization for Foreigners based on the Memory Principle of Cognitive Psychology

Chinese characters have always been regarded as “Heavenly script” for students whose mother tongue uses a phonemic script. There are two main reasons: (1) The relationship among form, sound and meaning in Chinese characters is different from that in phonemic scripts; (2) There is a lack of effective methods regarding the teaching of Chinese character recognition and memorization, which is in accordance with the characteristics of this writing and the universal laws of human memory. This paper proposes a teaching method for Chinese characters memorization based on “Event Domain Cognitive Model” theory. Starting from the relationship of form, sound and meaning in Chinese characters, and combining with the universal memory principle explained by “cognitive psychology”. It takes the component of modern Chinese characters as the memory unit, the event semantic logic between components as formation motivation of an integral character, the “Event Domain Cognitive Model” as the connection logic of characters family.