a summary of ted talk- learn to read chinese with ease by shao lan Hsueh

            Chinese characters are part of a beautiful language, but to outsiders can be difficult to learn.Chinese language “seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China,” says ShaoLan Hsueh in today’s talk, given at TED2013. Hsueh’s mission over the past few years has been to break down that barrier, making reading and writing in Chinese accessible to people who didn’t grow up doing it. So what is her solution? Chineasy!! To achieve basic literacy, Hsueh says, you need only know 1,000 characters, and the top 200 allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature. Chineasy involves pairing characters with facial expressions, body movements and images that conjure up words in English.

. Shaolan goes through 8 basic characters and explains how to chain them together to form more complicated characters. rom top left, left to right

• Fire – think of a person flailing their arms while on fire
• Tree
• Sun
• Moon
• Person
• Mouth – open wide
• Door – looks like a Wild West saloon door
• Mountain

These eight characters “are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters,” Hsueh explains. Using Chineasy’s simple, beautiful illustrations, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to many other words and phrases. In this talk, Hsueh takes us through almost 30 characters; here, some more examples based on those foundational eight.

from the first 8 radicals (parts of a character), we have formed 30 characters. We can then chain 2 characters together to form phrases. For example a fire mountain is a volcano

Japan is the land of the rising sun, so sun character combined with foundation. If you take these characters and add ‘person’ character afterwards, it becomes Japanese person. Chinese emperors used to send their political opponents across the mountains, to exile – so mountains represent exile. An opening (mouth) that leads to exile is the exit.