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ShaoLan Hsueh

Chineasy: The New Way to Read Chinese Flexibound – Illustrated, March 11, 2014

by ShaoLan Hsueh (Author), Noma Bar (Illustrator)

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Learn to read and write Chinese with Chineasy—a groundbreaking approach that transforms key Chinese characters into pictograms for easy recall and comprehension.

Chinese is one of the oldest written languages, and one of the most difficult to master, especially for Westerners. With Chineasy, learning and reading Chinese has never been simpler or more fun. Breaking down the Great Wall of Language, iShaoLan Hsueh draws on her entrepreneurial and cultural background to create a simple system for quickly understanding the basic building blocks of written Chinese. Working with renowned illustrator Noma Bar, she transforms Chinese characters into charming pictograms that are easy to remember.

In Chineasy, she teaches the key characters, called radicals, that are the language’s foundation, and then shows how they can be combined to form new words and even phrases. Once you’ve mastered these key characters, you can practice your skills with three stories—a fairy tale, an Asian legend, and a contemporary fable—told using the radicals.

With Chineasy, readers of all ages will be able to navigate a Chinese menu, read signs and billboards, and grasp the meaning of most articles in a Chinese newspaper.

Print length

192 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harper Design
Publication date

March 11, 2014
Dimensions

0.9 x 7 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0062332090
ISBN-13

978-0062332097
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“These cute images make reading Chinese characters ‘Chineasy.’” — NPR's "Code Switch" Blog

“In her delightful book...Hsueh offers an inspired approach to learning more than 400 Chinese characters.” — San Francisco Chronicle Blog

From the Back Cover

Chinese is considered one of the most difficult languages to master. However, using the Chineasy system, anyone can begin to understand and read Chinese. It works by transforming Chinese characters into illustrations to make them easy to remember. This book teaches the key characters on which the language is built and how these characters can be combined to form more complex words and phrases. Learning Chinese has never been this simple or more fun!

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Design; Bilingual edition (March 11, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Flexibound ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062332090
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062332097
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.9 x 7 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #334,225 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #60 in Phonetics & Phonics Reference
- #269 in Alphabet Reference
- #1,783 in Foreign Language Reference

Customer Reviews:
742 ratings

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About the author

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ShaoLan Hsueh

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Born in Taipei and now living in London, ShaoLan Hsueh is a creator, entrepreneur, geek, writer, traveller and dreamer.

Chineasy is based on a method that ShaoLan designed to help her two British born children learn to read Chinese. She launched Chineasy after a rousingly well-received TED Talk in Long Beach, California in 2013. Her aim with Chineasy is to help anyone in the world to understand China, Chinese culture and its language.

For her this is also an arts project, as she grew up in an artistic family, being the daughter of a ceramic artist and a calligrapher. She is connecting the dots by going back to her artistic upbringing, and connecting her life's journey through the East and West.

www.ShaoLan.com and www.Chineasy.org

Twitter: @ShaoLan_Hsueh and @Hello_Chineasy

Facebook: facebook.com/ShaoLanChineasy

Customer reviews

5 star		70%
4 star		15%
3 star		7%
2 star		4%
1 star		4%

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Flav

Beautiful designs

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 27, 2022

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It's a beautiful book. I don't think it covers all radicals and some are only mentioned briefly without many useful examples of characters, which is a shame, but it's a beautiful book.

Helpful

Spence

Original way to reinforce hanzi

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 7, 2014

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Pros:
The book was organized based on the frequency of radicals, rather than frequency of the characters, which is a much better way to build a mental foundation for remembering characters and is very unique among Chinese books.
Combining radicals with pictures in the characters helps the brain create mental hooks. Also very original.
The author was careful to note the differences between traditional and simplified characters when there were differences. And, on a personal note, it was a relief to see a new book with an emphasis on the traditional set, as they are becoming rare.
It's very pretty. That sounds like a silly reason to recommend a book, but the fact is that making the book interesting makes the subject easier to study.

Cons:
The examples switch to simplified characters seemingly at random. In each case, I can see why she chose it (if the traditional is too complicated, she chose simplified; if the simplified masked the original meaning too much, she chose traditional), but in any case, it leaves the reader with a jumbled mix of characters in his head. Oddly, it seems the match pretty closely with the Japanese kanji character set, which is kind of useful in a way.
Not much emphasis was put into repetition, especially in pronunciation. Despite the good learning hooks I mentioned above, I felt like I'd forgotten a lot by the end. Some exercises or more examples would have gone a long way.
The author frequently describes the oracle bone script and seal script, but it takes a feat of the imagination to guess what she means. I've found that books that actually show the evolution of the character are much more memorable than those that don't. Adding this would make this both a great learning material and a great reference.

Kindle-specific gripes:
Even on my iPad, I found myself having to zoom the text quite often.
The author constantly refers to other pages in the book, which is great. But come on... let's catch up with the current century and make these links. The table of contents and the index too. This ebook is fairly difficult to navigate and nigh impossible to use as a reference because of that.

13 people found this helpful

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Laif

Magnificent for the complete beginner!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 18, 2014

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I absolutely love this little book. I bought it immediately after noticing the recent story posted on the NPR website. It's a genius idea to introduce a few hundred related characters using bright, colorful simple graphics which remind you of what the radicals (parts of each character) mean. It's a really easy and quick way to start memorizing the meaning of Chinese characters. When it arrived, I read the whole thing through carefully from front to back in about three hours. Now, I just take an hour here and there to page back and forth in the book, looking for connections between the various characters. It's a very relaxing way to study.

It's quite a different approach from another book which I bought a few months ago ( Tuttle: Learning Chinese Characters ). Tuttle gives you twice as many characters in their book, but it seems that it is slapped together a bit more sloppily. Tuttle gives you a little original story for each character which is supposed to act as a mnemonic. I definitely understand the value in that method. Another resource I bought did the same for Japanese kana, and that became a real breakthrough for me in my memorization. However, as a person who is just starting out with Chinese, I'm just more comfortable with ShaoLan's straightforward visual method with a solid foundation based upon the meanings of each radical.

The only complaint I have is that the author hasn't yet made ten more books, each with 400 more characters for me to learn. I hope those will be published soon.

As others have stressed, I would also advise against buying the Kindle version of the book. I initially bought the ebook for my first generation Nexus 7, but the book was painfully slow to page through (because most of the pages consist of images, rather than plain text). One of the joys in this sort of book is that you can quickly flip back and forth to compare various characters with each other. I found I just couldn't do that easily with the electronic version of the book. I returned the ebook for a refund, and bought the physical version, instead.

10 people found this helpful

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Bibliophile

Holds up to the potential of the authors TED Talk and is helping me finally learn some characters. Enjoyable & Informative.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 5, 2014

Verified Purchase

This book turned out very well! I saw the TED talk that Shao Lan gave and was hoping she would make a series of videos so that I could finally learn a few characters. Her explanations are fabulous and make learning the characters easy. It's not called Chineasy for no reason. I have been trying to learn Chinese characters for decades, and this is the first time that I am finding it EASY.

I emailed the author after I watched her TED talk to find out how I could see more of her teachings. She said that she was focusing on creating a book, not videos. I thought - ugh - a book - that sounds hard and dull. But when her book came out, I gave it a looksy, and found it is as fun and lively and interesting and entertaining and easy as her talk. Well not quite as easy because I have to read instead of watching her on TV, but close.

She has this way of breaking down the characters into meaningful parts. She acknowledges there are differences between traditional and modern and sometimes uses both - but it's not meant to be a thorough contrast and compare. It's supposed to make learning characters easier for non-native speakers. That it accomplishes with lively graphics, excellent descriptions and very helpful organization and flow.

I recommend this book. If you're not sure, then watch her TED Talk for free and you will get an idea of her approach to teaching Chinese characters. The book is true to her style. I think the artist she worked with did a great job of capturing the energy the author brings to the subject and her lively approach.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

⭐️Nez⭐️

A great introduction to the Chinese language!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 6, 2019

Verified Purchase

I bought this for my son who had to take compulsory Chinese lessons in his first year at secondary school. This book was recommended by the teachers there and I can see why.

It's a great book for learning the basics. It gives you simple examples of how words are formed and give you easy, image heavy icons on how to remember what the letters and words are. These techniques really simplify the learning process and help you to store the information in your mind palace!

If you have to take Chinese as a language or just have a vague interest in the language then you won't go far wrong with this book.

9 people found this helpful

Mr. Edsko de Vries

Great book, but choice of vocabulary could be better

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 24, 2014

Verified Purchase

Chineasy is a great book that teaches vocabulary in order of the visual construction of the characters, rather than in order of word frequency. Thus, you might learn 人 person (“person”, a standard introductory word) followed by 从 (“to follow”: one person behind the other) and 众 (“crowd”: three people), neither of which you would normally learn so early. I found this a very helpful way to learn characters quickly and remember them much better.

One downside to this is that you learn a lot of words that you are unlikely to be using any time soon, such as 人鱼 “mermaid”, 小鬼 “imp” and 公主 “princess”. Moreover, my Chinese friends tell me that a lot of words in the book are archaic, such as 犬 “dog” (which, in that case, I suppose might be translated more like “hound”?), and the book does not always mention this. That said, it is still useful to learn 犬 because the next character that follows is 吠, which is a combination of 口 “mouth” and 犬 and means “to bark”.

So while this character build up is useful, the book seems to miss on some obvious combinations and related characters that are a lot more frequent than, say, “mermaid”. For instance, it covers both 手 “hand” and 机 “machine” but not 手机 “mobile phone”; 酉 “wine vessel” (archaic) and 酒 alcohol (which adds 氵, the radical for water), but not the very common character 西 “west”; it covers both 明 “bright” and 白 “white” but not 明白 “to understand”, etc. In fact, there is very little overlap between the vocabulary covered in Chineasy and the vocabulary from the HSK vocabulary lists (which are organized by frequency).

Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this book and it helped me quickstart my character learning. I would recommend it and if a second volume ever came out I would definitely buy it.

39 people found this helpful

Rachel Howard

Fascinating

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 22, 2022

Verified Purchase

Anyone with an interest in language will find this interesting. It’s one of the few sources I’ve seen that gives a user-friendly insight into how the building blocks of Chinese writing originated and how they’re used in combination. If you’re trying to learn Chinese, this is an essential companion.

ross anderson

Chineasy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 10, 2021

Verified Purchase

part of a series now of books introducing the reader to chinese by way of visual pictographs and their meaning .
A simpler approach to learning a complex and impenetrable language otherwise.
reasonably priced.
unique approach.

One person found this helpful

Infoanxiety

Teaches you 100’s of Chinese characters simply in a well put together, colourful book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 25, 2019

Verified Purchase

Bought this book after seeing the author on TED talks. It’s a lovely visual book and quickly builds your repertoire of symbols whilst explaining a little of the history behind each one. I found it fascinating and easy.

3 people found this helpful

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