There are over 3500 frequently-used Chinese characters, Learning them has always been regarded as a challenging task not only for Non-Chinese-Background-Speaking (NCSB) learners but also for Chinese native speakers when they start their first language acquisition. This article summa rises some different ways of learning characters practiced in the field of learning Chinese as a Foreign or Second Language.

1. The Radical and Stroke Sequential Approach
The traditional way of teaching Chinese characters is to direct learners' attention to the radicals of which each character is structured. This is followed by an illustration of the stroke orders of the character. The Pinyin Romanization and English are listed alongside the characters, and then learners are asked to pronounce the characters or add Pinyin Romanization to the characters listed by Chinese teachers. This traditional radical or stroke sequential approach to characters is still alive in the sphere of teaching Chinese to foreign learners and the best examples can be found in the textbooks by Lu (2001), Liu, et al. (2002), Zhang, et al. (2004) and Ma (2005).

2. The Systematic Approach
The most common practice in study Chinese characters to foreign learners is to teach them the form, the pronunciation and the meaning of a character first, followed by demonstrating its stroke orders. However, this makes the learning of characters hard to foreign learners , as unlike the alphabetic-based language, Chinese writing is an ideographic system where the form, pronunciation and meaning of a character are integrated; therefore, there is a need to separate reading of characters from writing. Zhang (1997) advocates an approach where the teaching of characters follows a systematic way of learning the basic strokes and stroke orders of single characters first, and then compound characters. The whole idea of this approach to the teaching of characters is expressed in the book entitled Rudiments of Chinese Character Writing.

3. The OVAL-Writing Approach
OVAL-Writing is an innovated approach to the learning of Chinese characters. It is specially designed for Non-Chinese-Speaking-Background (NCSB) learners, allowing NCSB beginners to accelerate their learning curve and fast track their mastery of Chinese characters. The 5-letter acronym stands for Observing, Visualizing, Articulating, Listening and Writing respectively. This approach intends to combine the learner's visual, auditory and kinesthetic senses together aiming for character retention which is away from the traditional focus of learning characters that is on character recognition and memorization.

4. The Integrative Perceptual Approach
This approach is based on the roentgenographic theory developed by Marlton and Booth (1997). It requires the learning of Chinese characters closely associated with the learner's own language use and experience. Characters are taught in clusters rather than in isolation. Chinese teachers use similarities and variations among related characters in the clusters to highlight and emphases crucial aspects of Chinese characters such as their structural features, written form and pronunciation.

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