This exploratory study investigated whether characters should be introduced according to the difficulty of their internal structures or according to a frequency index adopted by most introductory textbooks. The following question was addressed: How does each of the following six properties of a character—type, formation, internal structures, components, number of strokes and frequency— affect CFL learners’ performance? The results of this exploratory indicate that stroke numbers and character frequency are the only two significant predictors defining the difficulty level of characters based on CFL beginners’ actual performance data. |