Chineasy

Chineasy
Headquarters London, UK
Founder(s) ShaoLan Hsueh
CEO ShaoLan Hsueh
Industry Online education, Chinese Language, Graphic Design, Education
Services Second language acquisition (Chinese)
Slogan(s) Break down the Great Wall of Chinese language
Website chineasy.com
Advertising no
Registration no
Launched 14 February 2013 (2013-02-14)
Current status Online and publications

Chineasy is an Internet startup created with the purpose of teaching how to read Chinese characters created by the entrepreneur Shaolan Hsueh. It uses simple illustrations of key "building blocks" that can be combined to create more complex characters and sentences.[1] Shaolan published the book Chineasy: The New Way to Read Chinese in March 2014 contains about 400 characters based on 64 of these "building blocks".[2] It was based on her widely viewed 2013 TED talk [3] and funded via a crowdfunding campaign though Kickstarter.[4]

Chineasy has a popular Facebook page[5] where students get new lessons in Chinese characters each day.

Chineasy has been widely featured in the press, including the Financial Times,[6] the Wall Street Journal,[7] Time magazine, and National Public Radio.

The Method

ShaoLan Hsueh created Chineasy using 'Building block’ [3] Method to allow learners to accumulate their vocabulary quickly. To develop this method, she started by breaking down thousands of Chinese Characters on her computer. She then analysed them and prioritised most basic elements.[8] By combining a few basic Chinese characters, one can construct many more ‘compound’ and ‘phrase’ and even sentences.

Building block

The Chinese language is traditionally taught through a series of between roughly 180 and 215 radicals. These radicals form the characters one can use to read, write and speak Chinese. In Chineasy ‘building block’ refer to some of the most common and simple radicals that one could use to build many characters and phrases. An example is the character 木, which means ‘tree’ or ‘wooden’.

Chineasy Method -- Building Block, Compound and Phrase

Compound

One building block (e.g. ‘tree’ 木 or the character 人 for ‘person’), can be combined with one or more other characters to make a compound character: For example, two trees (木) together, it means woods (林); Add a person (人) next to a tree (木), ’ it means 'to rest' (休). Compound characters can also comprise two or more different building blocks.

Phrase

Both ‘building block’ and ‘compound’ refer to single-character words in Chinese. Phrases are the 'words' constructed by two or more characters. For example, a fire (火) and mountain (山) means volcano (火山).[9] The mouth (口) of the volcano is crator (火山口).

Illustrated Characters[10]

To make basic Chinese symbols easy to remember, Hsueh decided to use illustrations and storytelling. Chineasy characters are illustrated by various illustrators including Noma Bar. Chineasy illustrations not only cover pictographic objects, but also verbs, adjectives, concepts and abstract ideas.

By combining two or three Building Blocks, one can create many more.

Traditional vs. Simplified

Chineasy teaches sometimes traditional and sometimes simplified forms (which version makes the better illustration for learning purposes). Hsueh argued that Traditional and simplified forms of Chinese still share a great number of characters, and in real life – just as in the case of British English and American English – you will come across both forms. English speakers are familiar with not only different spellings (‘colour’ vs ‘color’) but also the use of different words to refer to the same thing (‘flat’ vs ‘apartment’, ‘rubbish’ vs ‘garbage’).[11]

Awards & Recognition 

| video 1 = ShaoLan: Learn to Read Chinese...with ease!, TED[13]
| video 2 = Chineasy Lesson 1, YouTube[14]

Editions

As of February 2015, Chineasy is translated in eleven languages: Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Finnish and Swedish.
(English) Shaolan Hsueh, Chineasy: The New Way to Read Chinese, Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2014 (ISBN 978-0500650288).
(French) Shaolan Hsueh, Le chinois, c'est pas sorcier, Éditions Hachette (Marabout), 2014 (ISBN 978-2-501-09361-3).

References

  1. ↑ "Chineasy". Chineasy Website.
  2. ↑ Chineasy: The New Way to Read Chinese (Flexibound ed.). HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 978-0062332097.
  3. 1 2 "Learn to read Chinese...with ease". TED.com. May 5, 2013.
  4. ↑ "Chineasy: The easiest way to learn Chinese". Kickstarter.com. July 23, 2013.
  5. ↑ "Chineasy Facebook Page".
  6. ↑ Berwick, Isabel (August 9, 2013). "Learn Mandarin the Chineasy way". FT.com.
  7. ↑ Wolfe, Alexandra (March 14, 2014). "A New Way to Learn Chinese". WSJ.com.
  8. ↑ Berwick, Isabel (2013-08-09). "Learn Mandarin the Chineasy way". Financial Times. ISSN 0307-1766. Retrieved 2015-10-23.
  9. ↑ "volcano (火山)".
  10. ↑ "Chineasy illustrated characters designed to make learning Chinese easy". Dezeen. Retrieved 2015-10-23.
  11. ↑ Murphy, Siobhan (March 13, 2014). "How Chineasy inventor ShaoLan Hsueh used beautiful design to decode Mandarin and Cantonese". Metro.co.uk.
  12. ↑ Wallpaper* Design Awards (January 15, 2014). "Wallpaper* Design Awards Life Enhancer of the Year – Wallpaper*". Wallpaper.com.
  13. ↑ Recorded in February 2013 at TED Conference in Long Beach; released online by TED in May 2013.
  14. ↑ Released March 2014.
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