TedTalks : Shao Lan "Learn to read Chinese.. with ease!" (summary)

Learn to Read Chinese.. With Ease!

By Shao Lan

Growing up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher, one of her most treasured memories was her mother showing her the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters.

Over the past few years, she has been wondering if she can breaks down the impenetrability as the Great Wall of China, anyone can understand and appreciate the beauty of that sophisticated language. She started thinking about a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful.

Since the age of five, she started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence. She learned new characters every day during the course of the next 15 years.  A Chinese scholar would understand 20.000 characters. Non-Chinese scholar only need 1.000 to understand the basic literacy. The top 200 will allow the non-Chinese to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature; enough to read road signs, restaurant menus, to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers.

She started with eight to show how the method works by asking people to open the mouth as wide as possible until it’s square. First, she draws a shape that indicates Person. Second, shape of the fire is a person with two arms on both sides as if yell frantically. That symbol is originally from the shape of the flame. Then, continue with a tree, mountain, sun, and moon. The symbol of the door looks like a pair of saloon doors in the wild west. She calls those eight characters radicals. Those are the building blocks for people to create lots more characters.

There are a number of other shapes that she gave in her speech, they have gone almost 30 characters. By using that method, the first eight radicals will allow people to build 32, the next group of its will build an extra 32. With a very little effort, people will be able to learn a couple hundred characters, which is the same as a Chinese eight year old. Then, they can start to build phrases. For example, the mountain and the fire together as fire mountain, indicates “ a volcano.” And there are others example of phrases that have provided.