The Application of a New OpenType Font in International Chinese Education—A Case Study of Character Family Teaching

彩色字体库利用Font Creator软件开发，涵盖《国际中文教育中文水平等级标准》3000常用汉字，采用六色编码体系：灰色表征象形字，紫红色标注指事字及符号，朱红色突显意符，蓝色与绿色区分不同语音关联度的声符(蓝色表示声符与整字读音相异，绿色表示声符与整字声韵相同)，黄色代表记号部件，并辅以数字标注汉字声调特征。该字体便于国际学生认知汉字理据，效果直观，应用方便。使用彩色字体库，在汉字教学中建立字音字族、字义字族、以及建立意符子系统，目的是提高多媒体教学、在线教学中汉字教学的效率。A new OpenType font made by Font Creator. This new font encompasses 3000 commonly used Chinese characters from the “Chinese Proficiency Standards for International Chinese Language Education”. A six-color coding system was employed: gray to represent pictographs, magenta to annotate indicative characters and symbols, vermilion to highlight semantic components, blue and green to distinguish phonetic components with different degrees of phonetic relevance (blue indicates phonetic components with different pronunciations from the whole character, green indicates phonetic components with the same phonetic and rhyme as the whole character), and yellow to represent sign components, supplemented by numerical annotations for the tonal features of Chinese characters. This font is very convenient to International students for knowing the motivations of Chinese characters. The efficiency is very evident, and the application is very convenient. By using this new kind of font, we can establish phonetic character families, semantic character families, and ideogram subsystems in Chinese character teaching, with the goal of enhancing teaching efficiency in multimedia and online education.