Wild Association

Instead of making reference to the historical origins of the characters, 李衛民 Li in 浙江溫嶺 Wenling, Zhejiang suggests a more liberated approach to learn the compositions of the characters.

His approach called 奇特聯想(wild association) is to encourage children to come up with their own explanation, as imaginative as possible, of why the characters are composed in such a way. As an example, a child describes the character 愉([yú], happy) as a (一) man (人) with a knife (刀) going to the moon (月) and feeling (心) happy. Similar to 李衛民 Li, 安子介 Ann in Hong Kong developed his own explanations for the 3650 most commonly used characters and used this to help foreigners to learn the characters. For example, the character 字 means that a child 子 born under a roof is well protected and thus can hand down the heritage to the next generations through the use of the characters (字). Other than 李衛民 Li and 安子介 Ann, 王安石 Wang in the 宋代 Song dynasty also used a similar approach to compose his 字說(About the characters). As an example, 桃([táo], peach) is from the west and thus the 木([mù], tree) is in the west (left) side of the character, while the tree of 李([lǐ], plum) and 杏([xìng], apricot) grows too tall that the 木([mù], tree) are at the top. However, since all these approaches deviate too much from the more severe historical account, most conservative Chinese linguists do not recommend this at all.

To summarize, common to the above approaches is that learning the characters first is of crucial importance. Only upon the mastery of many characters, children can move on to do substantial reading and writing. However, it is often argued that in this way, the children's development of reading and writing skills must be unnecessarily delayed in order to squeeze out the time for learning the characters. Another similarity among these approaches is to focus on decomposing the characters into components and giving children a reason for why the characters are composed as they are. But what these approaches have left out is to analyze the orthographic structures of the characters, which is also crucially essential for children to fully understand the composition of the characters. As opposed to intensive approach, extensive approach suggests that children should read meaningful texts right from the beginning.