An analysis of some errors made in writing Chinese characters by learners at the University of Nairobi

Abstract

The present study investigated some of the errors made in writing standard Chinese characters by Year 1 to Year 4 undergraduate students at the Confucius Institute, University of Nairobi (UoN), Kenya. One of the authors, who teaches at the Institute, observed that learners experienced considerable difficulty in writing Chinese characters. This observation motivated the study, which sought to identify the types of errors made, explore their possible causes, and propose pedagogical solutions. Although none of the learners were native speakers of Chinese, they had the advantage of being instructed by several native speakers of the language. Each participant was issued with a questionnaire to provide personal details and was further required to write a short essay. All responses were produced using Chinese characters and were subsequently analyzed for writing errors. The analysis revealed two major categories of errors: errors in sentence structure and errors related to the writing of strokes within characters. The present paper focuses specifically on errors associated with stroke writing. The findings indicate that learners committed significantly more errors of stroke omission than stroke addition. The strokes most frequently added were piě (ノ), héng (一), diǎn (丶), and shù (丨), while the strokes most commonly omitted included piě (ノ), héng (一), diǎn (丶), shù (丨), and tí (㇀). Errors of stroke omission accounted for 73.7% of the total errors, whereas errors of stroke addition constituted 26.3%, making omission errors almost three times more frequent than addition errors. In addition, two radicals were omitted in some instances. These errors may be attributed partly to the learners’ level of proficiency in Chinese. However, the high frequency of stroke omission errors appears to stem primarily from an inadequate understanding of the correct stroke order in character writing, coupled with insufficient practice.