| Lacking knowledge of Chinese character fromation, teachers and international learners of Chinese found Chinese characters difficult to teach and learn. Few Chinese-English dictionaries, however, provide instructionally useful information about character formation. The graphic-phonic combination type of characters account for over 80% of all Chinese characters. Therefore, the phonetic indicators of Chinese characters deserve special attention, especially the information about the phonetic indicators a Chinese-English pedagogical dictionary should provide merits a systematic study. Hence, this study focuses on the Level One characters in The General Service Standard Chinese Characters List which are regarded as suitable for an intermediate Chinese-English pedagogical dictionary. Since 1,141 characters in this list have been examined and 314 phonetic indicators have been worked out in a former study, this study does reasearch on the left 2,359 characters.Some researchers hold that if the graphic part no longer indicating meaning or the phonic part doesn’t indicate pronunciation, such a graphic-phonic character can only be considered as a semi-marker character, or even an absolute marker character. This study reviewed such opinions critically and proposed that a teacher of Chinese should teach not only the form, meaning and pronunciation of present-day simplified characters, but also the original motivation of Chinese character formation and even the changes in the form, meaning and pronunciation. For this purpose, a Chinese-English Pedagogical Dictionary should provide information about each character’s formation and etymology, just as an English Learner’s Dictionary provide information about English word formation and etymology. This thesis also argues that phonetic indicators with the same form but different pronunciations should be treated as different indicators; in identifying a phonetic indicator, its tone and vowel initial can be disregarded and only its vowel base will be resorted.From those 2,359 Chinese characters, this study recognized 1,955 graphic-phonicones from which 619 groups of phonetic indicators have been identified. Thus, in the Level One characters of The List of Common Standard Chinese Characters thereare 693 groups of phonetic indicators in total. |
