![]() "My real agenda is to bridge the gap between the East and the West, so that you can form your own views with accurate and sufficient knowledge," she says. 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. Whether you are planning a business trip or a vacation, Chineasy® Travel is the perfect pocket-sized companion to help you break down the barriers of language and culture, and broaden your traveling horizons in the Chinese-speaking world.Chineasy teaches the rich and complex Chinese language through cleverly designed images that illustrate the meaning of each character. Through teaching fundamental building-blocks, ShaoLan also explains the history and cultural influences behind each character. Illustrated by Noma Bar, this guide breaks down essential characters for reading directions, making purchases, using public transport, ordering food off a menu, and more. Her visual, building-block-style teaching method makes learning characters simple and fun: by learning common characters, readers can quickly grasp and communicate basic words and phrases while traveling. Entrepreneur ShaoLan Hsueh created Chineasy® to educate the world about the richness of Chinese culture through its written language. The essential pocket-sized Chineasy guide to characters, phrases, and culture for travelers makes learning Chinese fun and easy. ![]()
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