In Chinese language teaching/learning, almost all students are able to effectively use Pinyin, and develop their listening and speaking skills. Particularly the beginners are able to use basic language skills to communicate in real social life with high enthusiasm. However, with the progression of the course, they felt that the Chinese characters became more and more difficult to recognize, to write and to remember. To keep their interest, and to avoid their giving up the learning just after dipping into the water, the Chinese teachers have tailored their teaching methods to meet the students’ needs such as associating their interest in drawing pictures with the pictographic, ideographic features of Chinese written language, to activate their abilities in observation, imagination, analysis, creation and long term memory for the purpose of keeping their learning enthusiasm and achieving maximum results with little efforts.

1. Activating students’ ability of observation

Teachers first explained to students: the Chinese language sounds like a song and each Chinese character looks like a picture. As the saying goes 'seeing is believing', the teacher presented Chinese characters video clips to the students and pictures to guide them with a careful observation of Chinese characters and explore their illustrated features. Through observing, the students experienced the most attractive features of Chinese characters and their specific original meaning.

2. Activating students’ ability of imagination

This process aimed to let students think, link the corresponding Chinese characters to the pictures by watching video clips.

Students are matching the pictures with the corresponding characters

3. Activating students’ ability of analysis

Teachers guided the students to learn the structures of Chinese characters by observing the significant radicals. After that they did the linking practice - using the radicals to guess the meaning of characters.

the practice

4. Activating students’ ability of creation, leading to long term memory.

Observation, imagination, analysis let the students develop their own creative ability, practice writing and enhance their memory. At the same time, the students' enthusiasm for learning Chinese characters got highly increased. For example, some students described the character爸as the two points on the Chinese character for "father"(爸) like the smiling eyes; the following tow sweeping strokes like father's beard; "ba"（巴） like a laughing open mouth with two rabbit teeth. Childish as they are, they were actually used their thinking skills effectively.

Students were creating pictures based on the characters