Getting Some Preliminary Numbers

The Stanford Chinese School textbook I evaluated last week has their lists of character vocabulary available online. Mostly out of curiosity, I did a test with my daughter on the lists for their first three books, intended for first grade uses. I asked her to look at each character and see if she had learned them. If she could pronounce one correctly and either give its meaning or using it in a phrase, she would mark it with a "plus". If she felt she knew a character, but could not recall its pronunciation or meaning, then mark it with a "check". And if she had no idea of a character, then mark it with a "minus".

I did not have high expectations on the outcome, as character recognition was one of the difficulties she was experiencing in school. This was also a very unfair test, for the following reasons:

1. She was looking through a "dry" character list without any contextual help. It's much harder to recognize characters this way.
2. There are quite a few characters in the list that are there because they happen to be in the lesson text/story. They are not by any means the must-learn ones for first-graders. My daughter never used this textbook so she should not be expected to know them.
3. There is no Pinyin help in the character list, which is a good thing but it does make it harder for my daughter who is used to see characters with their Pinyin marked.

Anyway, here is a breakdown by the books:

1. First book contains 105 characters, of which she had 50% in pluses, 9% in checks, and 41% in minuses.
2. Second book contains 95 characters, of which she had 28% in pluses, 12% in checks, and 59% in minuses
3. Third book contains 102 characters, of which she had 20% in pluses, 7% in checks, and 75% in minuses

The numbers do not look very bad, against my low expectations. It also shows a nice and telling trend from Book One to Book Three, which probably means the books are well designed in their progress in difficulty.

There are, however, some surprises in the "minus" category: characters I thought she should have learned or at least looked familiar, including
边，毛，黑，红，千，万，共，也，无，长，又，回，林，空，etc.

She was quite interested in doing the test in the beginning, but graduated got bored as it dragged on. At the end, she probably had rushed it without paying close attention. As a third grader, she had quite a fun time adding up her "scores" and trying to figure out the percentages. A little math always helps to brighten up the day.

Along the way, we found a counting error in the Book Three list: it contains 102 characters, not the 105 claimed by the book. I will send an email to its author.