![]() Her aim is to build in animations to help learners remember each one. So far, Hsueh has commissioned illustrations for some 200 of the most-used characters. “If you know the sun and the moon you can build another character – the sun and moon together means brightness because sun and moon were the source of light before electricity was invented.” Hsueh points to the sun and moon to explain how it works. These include, for example, signs relating to nature, objects, body parts and people. So far she has mapped several thousand characters, and their compounds, and they are further placed within categories that reflect the world that surrounded the ancient Chinese people who first drew these pictograms. It looks like a giant projection of the astrological constellations, criss-crossed by a mass of lines across space. She shows me a simplified map of her system on her laptop. She used her technical knowledge to spend months building her own programme to log, analyse and group characters together. Some of them are much more frequently used than others, so you prioritise them.” You only need to know a few of those building blocks. “It’s just like when you see a Harry Potter Lego castle – it’s not easy to see what they are made of until you break them down, and by breaking them down and analysing them on the computer I am able to see, just as the Lego castle is built with several frequently used building blocks, so there are thousands of characters and they are built with similar elements. ![]() “In a nutshell, I take thousands of characters, I analyse them and break them down,” she says. (Her daughter is now 10 and her son eight.) Hsueh realised that going back to the ancient building blocks of the Chinese language, the pictograms that had surrounded her as a child, was exactly what she needed to capture and pass on to her children. Most of the work was done when her children were asleep. What she calls “my hobby” took two years to develop, during a sabbatical from her venture capital business. She decided to create something that would engage her kids and had a proper methodology. The problem, says Hsueh, was that “it was all random and there was no method behind it”. Most of the systems are repetition and speaking-based – so the focus is on being able to say a few Chinese words rather than on recognising the characters. Frustrated with her English-born children’s lack of interest in learning Mandarin, Hsueh tried several different methods of teaching them herself, and sent them to after-school clubs. Hsueh realised she was on to something as soon as she’d given the talk: “A lot of people came up to me afterwards and said they could not believe it – they never thought they could learn Chinese and now they are interested and want to learn.” The talk has been viewed more than 900,000 times.īehind this “flash card” approach to learning basic Chinese characters lies some serious research. It’s a riveting piece of theatre: she paces the stage and introduces the nine basic characters – including mouth, person, fire – that form the building blocks for reading hundreds more. The Chineasy phenomenon came to public attention in May this year, when a talk Hsueh had given about her new learning method in February – at TED in California – went online. We meet in Chineasy’s tiny Soho office, where beautifully illustrated Chinese characters cover the walls, the papers fluttering gently in the breeze. “It is a legacy, and something I would like to share,” she says. And she’s (so far) funded the project herself from her savings, giving it all away free via her Facebook page and website. She’s developing a kind of shareware for the mind – a groundbreaking method of reading and interpreting Chinese characters for westerners, called “Chineasy”. Hsueh later moved to London and set up a venture capital investment firm in 2005, but her latest project is one directly linked to her family roots among the paint pots and calligraphy brushes. She didn’t immediately take on her parents’ artistic legacy: describing herself as an unashamed “geek”, she studied biochemistry at university, wrote some unlikely and bestselling Microsoft user manuals (“I used my imagination and put a lot of my own thoughts in”) and went on to be a first-wave internet entrepreneur, co-founding pAsia, an early internet success story, in 1995. “I grew up in this environment, in the mud, in the ink, in the paintbrushes,” she says. ShaoLan Hsueh was born and raised in Taiwan, the daughter of a calligrapher and a ceramic artist.
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