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.本探索性研究調查華語為外國語的初學者，是否應當依照漢字結構的難易度，亦或根據大部分教科書所採用的字頻指標來決定漢字學習。本文的核心研究問題為：漢字的六個特性－種類、形成、內部結構、部件、筆畫數目和字頻－如何影響初學者的識字表現？探索性研究結果顯示，僅漢字筆畫數目及教科書內漢字出現頻率能成功地預測漢字難易指數暨初學者的漢字習得表現。

華語為外國語學習; 漢字習得; 二語習得

Chinese as a foreign language; Chinese character acquisition