Hi Skritter-ers, does anyone know if vocab lists of normal Chinese public school books, 1st grade-12th grade, are available on skritter? Any user-submitted if not made my skritter? I seek to learn characters in the order that Chinese children do, rather than in the order taught to foreign adults.

Can I ask why you want to learn in this way?

Good Mandarin textbooks have been designed to provide second language learners with high frequency vocabulary words first, taking into account common radicals and how sections of those words (both 部首 and 部件) are combined to create other less common characters.

Chinese children, on the other hand, are learning Chinese characters with a very solid foundation of grammar and colloquial Chinese. There linguistic background knowledge and sense of the language is much stronger than a second language learner. Thus, the characters they learn might be considered much more complicated that what we would be used to at a beginner or elementary level.

I have to agree - as a kindergarten teacher in China, I'm sometimes baffled by the order in which characters are taught to my students, in terms of usefulness, relevance to the kids' classes, ease of writing, and anything else; sometimes it just seems like my colleagues just opened up a dictionary and picked out a dozen characters totally at random...

@FatDragon the same thing goes for kids' books in English, which seem overly interested in teaching kids the names of all the animals in the zoo and the specific noises they make, even though kids are unlikely to run into a lion or a giraffe at preschool.

To answer the OP, search on Anki for "Taiwan school" and you will get a very useful list.

To answer the other posters;

1) A complete absolute beginner of course should not be studying child word lists. If you really are an absolute beginner, yes avoid these lists for at least a little while.

2) The idea that a child doesn't need to learn a word at a particular age is complete nonsense! A word a child needs to know for every day communication, will either have been learnt already, or will be learnt in context as they come across it, ie "Mummy whats that?". Words a child learns in school are always going to be topical and supplementary to basic communication skills. Should a child learn names of the animals in a zoo all at once, or distributed over the course of one or more years. Grouping words into topics is natural, and also makes it easier for human teachers to teach.

3) Lists such as the Taiwan primary school word list, HSR, and others are extremely invaluable as they allow a learner to check their progress. It also allows educators to create teaching material that is going to be accessible for children of particular ages given they can reference against a standardised list. Further more, an objective measure of a persons language ability (flawed or not) is a useful thing in my opinion.

@James

I agree, and that's the same for Chinese children's books as well - these are common things for children to learn. However, those are logical arrangements and fit in with children's interests. I'm thinking more of the lessons in which my students learn random characters like 任，爸，and 靠 on the same day with no context tying them together. This is more like what I've seen with my colleagues character lessons as well as the books that my students use at school to learn characters. There are plenty of character books that read like flashcards, but most of the books I've seen that are designed like workbooks to study characters one or two at a time are incredibly random by my way of thinking.

@jww1066

And for a decent reason - talking about animals is a fantastic way to capture the attention of children. Not necessarily practical, but children certainly aren't going to pay attention to a lesson about personal finances.

" 任，爸，and 靠"

How is a child going to fail to learn these characters if they are taught on the same day? I cant imagine a scenario where this would be a problem, except maybe if they only had a minute to learn all three.

@GrandPoohBlah My children will be fascinated - FASCINATED - by my charming personal finance allegories involving rabbit home economics and the greedy banker Fox, who's always trying new schemes to get them into crushing debt.

Exactly. Im reasonably confident that my kid will start learning about personal finances through pocket money as soon as he hits the age where he wont just eat it (:

@董雅各 - I don't mean they're not going to learn the characters, I just mean that there's no logical correlation between them in terms of radicals, meaning, difficulty, usefulness, or anything else really. Most foreign learners are more likely to learn characters based on frequency and usefulness, and often if they correlate to something else they are studying, possibly a new textbook lesson or a new article they have read. The examples of 任，爸，and 靠 were not meant to directly reflect a lesson my students have been given either in the specific characters studied or the amount of characters studied, but only to demonstrate that young Chinese students are often taught characters in a seemingly random order with no context beyond that which they know as native speakers.

My point is that it will almost always be difficult for a foreigner to study characters from a native Chinese textbook because the books are intended for native speakers with a much better oral and cultural understanding of Chinese than most foreign learners can expect to have.

@all who replied: I am not a total beginner, I have been studying Chinese characters, speech, and culture, from the age of 8. I know probably close to one thousand characters, but many I have forgotten. The reason I wish to study the characters in the same order that Chinese children do is because I wish that by next fall I will know all the characters that Chinese children in "高二"(juniors in highschool) know. It would be easiest to have all the characters separated grade by grade so over the next few months I can mark off my progress by saying "Now I have all the characters of a third grader" and then up and up until I reach "高二". Does anyone have these lists? Taiwanese I believe will not work, because Taiwanese people use traditional characters right? And they probably do not study at exactly the same rate as Chinese public schools.

Sorry, I had these lists sitting around for Taiwan and Hong Kong, but I don't think I've come across the mainland flavor. I'm sure it's out there somewhere.