漢字之繁雜難學，不僅本國學童感到困難，外籍學生更是望之卻步，如何提升漢字學習的效率？儼然已成為華語文教學必須克服的難點。明末耶穌會士是歐洲漢學研究的先驅，也是外籍人士學習漢語的典範。利瑪竇（Matteo Ricci，1552－1610）於1582年抵達澳門，短短十餘年間，便能與中國儒士流利對談，並且能以漢字著書立說。考察利瑪竇學習漢字的方法與策略，當與古希臘流傳下來的記憶之術（mnemotechnics）密不可分。本文擬以利瑪竇《西國記法》作為研究材料，藉助認知語言學的觀念與方法，一則介紹《西國記法》的記憶法則，闡發記憶術如何提升漢字學習效率之奧秘；一則藉由利瑪竇對漢字構形理據的解構與重組，探究圖像化編碼的認知機制，並思考此種習字捷法如何運用到現代華語文教學上

The Chinese character is so complicated and difficult for both Chinese students and foreign students. To enhance the efficiency of Chinese character learning becomes a difficult task for teachers teaching Chinese as a foreign or second language. In the end of the 16th century, the Society of Jesus, pioneer of sinology, has been deemed as a learning model of Chinese language for European learners. Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), arriving in Macau in 1582 could communicate with the Confucian scholars and write books in Chinese within more than ten years. We observe that the success of Ricci's methods and strategies in learning Chinese characters can be attributed to the mnemotechnics from ancient Greece. With this understanding, the purpose of this paper is two-fold: (i) to introduce Ricci's Xiguo Jifa in an attempt to find ways to improve efficiency of learning Chinese characters from cognitive linguistic perspectives, and (ii) to investigate the cognitive mechanisms of character image encoding in terms of Ricci's reasoning on morphological decomposition and reconstruction in order to apply to teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language nowadays