How Design Can Help Chinese Teaching
By Leah Buley

Learning Chinese is a challenging endeavor. Mastering tens of thousands of characters takes years. But London-based entrepreneur ShaoLan Hsueh, born in Taipei, wanted to find a more straightforward method to help her English-speaking children learn the 200 characters required for fundamental reading comprehension.

She deconstructed frequently used Chinese characters into essential building blocks, producing a visual road map of the language that enabled non-Chinese speakers to recognize.

Her book Chineasy was released by HarperCollins, Thames & Hudson, and iTunes last month. Winner of the 2014 Wallpaper Magazine Design Award for "Life-Enhancer of the Year," it is one of the Designs of the Year nominees at London's Design Museum.

Two Chinese characters for "people" placed next to one another form the Chinese verb "follow."

Thanks to Chineasy

Noma Bar, an Israeli-born, London-based illustrator, illustrates Chinese with humorous pictograms. It is a visually driven method for deciphering the intricacies of written Chinese, providing insights into traditional Chinese culture.

For instance, the " woman " character is a fundamental element of the language. Combining two female characters yields the symbol for "argument." Three women in a group? "Adultery."

And ShaoLan explains that the Chinese character for "good" is composed of the characters for "woman" and "boy," reflecting the belief that a woman's virtue was historically determined by her ability to bear a son.

In Chinese by ShaoLan, the word "good" uses pictogram-enhanced characters for women and males.