Since November 2010, a team of a dozen researchers from fiveuniversities and institutes of four European countries has been workingon challenging project: how to adapt the Common European Framework ofReference for Languages (in use since the beginning of the 2000 for thelearning, teaching and assessment of European languages around Europe)to the Chinese language, a very distant language for European learners,with the peculiarity of its non-alphabetic writing system. In the end,the approach adopted by the team was to make a distinction between oraland written activities at each level of the framework. For the oralactivities the team has provided lists of words, and for the writtenactivities lists of characters. We focus on one point: we hope thisdissociation between oral and written in the Chinese framework willencourage more and more teachers to separate oral and written in teachingand learning activities (as well as in the selection of teaching materials)so as to allow the learners of Chinese to develop each language competencemore efficiently.