The Chineasy system has clear commercial potential as a design-friendly alternative to Rosetta Stone software or classes at a Berlitz center, but Hsueh's goals are even bigger. >'I deliberately did not want to go for the traditional Chinese way of drawing.'Īs a canny investor, Hseuh realized that a tool to simplify learning Chinese is something overachieving parents, business travelers, and people looking to reconnect with their roots would appreciate. If they can understand the character immediately, the Chineasy team proceeds with the design, otherwise, it's back to the drawing board. "The illustrations have to be something universal, modern, and elegant." Quality control happens close to home-after each new flashcard is completed, Hsueh tests them on her children. "I deliberately did not want to go for the traditional Chinese way of drawing because my audience is mainly Western," says Hsueh. The Chinese language is thousands of years old, yet Hsueh has infused the Chineasy system with her mid-century modern design sense by choosing bright blocks of color, simple sans serif fonts, and Paul Rand style illustrations as design motifs. With a properly constructed system, Hsueh believes the Chinese language can work like Lego bricks and allow children to gain fluency by playfully constructing words and phrases. Hsueh developed software to break thousands of characters into their constituent parts and began to imagine how the building blocks of the language could be taught with playful illustrations rather than rote memorization. Language clubs and textbooks failed to inspire her children, so she decided to design a better solution. While teaching her English-born children the rudiments of her mother tongue, she quickly realized how difficult the language was to learn outside of a native context. >Hsueh believes the Chinese language can work like Lego bricks.Ĭhineasy was created by ShaoLan Hsueh, a Taipei-born, London-based venture capitalist, design enthusiast, and self-proclaimed geek. Knowledge of more than 20,000 characters is required for serious scholarship, mastering 1,000 is a requirement for basic literacy, but learning 200 will allow newbies to make sense of street signs, menus, newspaper headlines, and puts learners on par with a Chinese eight-year-old. The system is designed to address the major challenge of learning Chinese-the great wall of symbols that need to be deciphered and memorized. For instance, putting the character for "person" inside the one for "door" creates the symbol for "escape." After mastering eight of these simple characters, called "radicals" in the Chineasy system, learners can combine them to unlock the meaning behind dozens of more complex characters. The symbol for "person" is anthropomorphized into a picture of a walking man, while the glyph for "door" is illustrated to look like a saloon entrance from a cowboy movie. Luckily for procrastinators with tickets already booked to Beijing, a new design-focused learning system called Chineasy can teach students basic literacy in a matter of days.Ĭhineasy, currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign, teaches English speakers how to read basic Chinese characters (traditional and simplified) by embedding them in colorful pictures that illustrate their meaning. Department of State's Foreign Service Institute, Chinese is a Class III language-the most difficult to master-and requires 2,200 hours of rigorous study to gain general proficiency. Image: ShaoLan HsuehĪccording to the U.S. ![]() The project was developed by ShaoLan Hsueh and is currently raising funds on Kickstarter. The book also features a picture library of characters for avid linguists to memorize as well as guidance on Mandarin pronunciation.Chineasy teaches the rich and complex Chinese language through cleverly designed images that illustrate the meaning of each character. Stories about the development of characters and customs provide the perfect introduction to Chinese culture, while games and activities allow children to put into practice what they have learned. The book is organized by themes such as numbers, family, animals, and food, each section covering vocabulary within that topic. Subsequent spreads feature lively scenes that help children to recognize over 100 Chinese characters. ![]() Introductory spreads explain how Chinese is written in pictograms-characters form building blocks for other words and sentences. ![]() The book features playful illustrations by Noma Bar that relate each character’s shape to its meaning, alongside games and activities to make learning interactive. The simple, super-smart way for children to learn their first 100 Chinese wordsĪ lively introduction for children to written Chinese, Chineasy® for Children makes learning Chinese fun and simple.
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