This study investigated Chinese-character learning strategies employed by 74 first-year American college learners of Chinese. This study attempted to answer the following research questions: (1) what Chinese-character learning strategies are most frequently used by first-year Chinese language learners?; (2) what are the factors underlying the most frequently used strategies?; and (3) are there any linear trends between the most frequently used strategies and character learning performance?. The results found seven most frequently used strategies. Furthermore, four of these strategies were stroke-orthographic-knowledge-based while the remaining three were phonological-semantics-knowledge-based. The stroke-orthographic-knowledge-based strategies accounted for 6.8% of the learners’ character learning performance.