A Brilliant Way to Learn Chinese Through Pictures
- 9:30 am |
Last month ShaoLan Hsueh found herself at a press conference in Taiwan to promote Chineasy, a highly visual method for learning the Chinese language she had developed over the past few years. It made little sense to the Taiwan-born Hsueh. “I wasn’t sure a press conference was necessary,” she says. “Was I going to teach native Chinese speakers about the language?”
After the event, Hsueh was surrounded by a group of 30 Chinese-speaking journalists. “I gave them a test,” she recalls. “I asked them, what do you think the character ‘woman’ means? Of course they knew the literal meaning,” she continues, “But no one knew the character is based on the shape of a woman laying on the floor bowing to her man.”
The whole point of Chineasy is to give the Chinese language context in order to make the thousands of characters easier to learn and remember. “The Chinese language has long been considered the most difficult major language to learn,” explains Hsueh, “Largely on account of the vast number and complexity of the characters.”
Hsueh began looking for a fun and visual way to teach her kids how to read Chinese. It didn’t exist. “When I began to teach my British-born children Chinese, I realized just how difficult Chinese characters are for a native English speaker to learn,” she says. “It was like torture for my kids.”
So Hsueh developed a computer program that decoded thousands of Chinese characters—breaking them down into smaller pieces and analyzing those characters to see how they correlated with each other. This is not unlike breaking down a Lego castle, she says. Hsueh quickly realized there were important building blocks to the Chinese language that could be combined to form compounds and more complex phrases and characters. But communicating that in a way non-native speakers could grasp was challenging. “This is where the illustrations come into place,” she says.
Each of the characters is turned into a clever illustration that is meant to make a memorable impression on the learner. So for example, the Chinese character “person (人)” traditionally looks like a wishbone, but in Chineasy, Hsueh has added a head and shoes to make it look like a person walking. Likewise, for the character “big (大 ),” a straight line with hands is added to “person,” which makes it look like a person stretching his arms wide to signify how big something is.
A Hunt Through History
Before they begin designing a character, the Chineasy team researches the definition, origin and history of the character. The goal is to tell a story with each building block so that a narrative for more complex characters can be built on top of it. “Whenever a new illustration is created, I show them to my children,” she says. “If they can guess the answer immediately, I know we’ve got it right. If they struggle, we go back to the studio and do it all over again.”
Chineasy was first introduced via a very successful Kickstarter campaign last fall, and Hsueh is now releasing the first edition of the book and will be launching an accompanying app for phones and tablets later this spring. The book and app guide learners through the very basics of the Chinese language. Hsueh says Chineasy is currently not so much a replacement for more comprehensive methods of language learning than it is a way to lay a good baseline and supplement future learning.
Despite the emphasis on language, the real goal though, says Hsueh, is to bridge the gap between the East and West that often causes misunderstandings and tension. “I want to give the West a real understanding and knowledge of China and Chinese culture through their own eyes,” she says. “Rather than through layers of packaging, manipulation or loss in translation.”
You can check out where to buy the Chineasy book here.