Here's the character for tree, with a dollop of vegetation on top for good measure: Here's a Chinese ad for Ray Romano's sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond." Can you spot the word "everybody" now that you know the word for person? Here's the word "adult" on the upper left-hand corner of a cover of a Japanese magazine (Chinese and Japanese share the same character set, more or less). Here's the word for adult, combining big and person: Putting the lesson to work, here's the Chinese-language cover of the Harry Potter novel The Prisoner Of Azkaban. A person with arms stretched wide is "big." A person inside a mouth is a prisoner. It's harder to forget with teeth, tongue and uvula: Take a look. Here's "ren," the radical for person, illustrated with head and feet: ShaoLan worked with London design firm Brave New World and Israeli illustrator Noma Bar to breathe a little life into eight basic radicals, and then expanded on those by working them into pictographic stories. By day I worked as an Internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist and by night I was consumed with creating a system to make learning Chinese easy." Even my own children found it daunting. That’s when I started to think about how a new, simpler method for reading Chinese might be useful. As I settled into my new life, I observed how in vogue China was and how eagerly people wanted to embrace the culture – yet they struggled with the language. Two years later, I had one degree and two children. "Twelve years ago I moved to England and enrolled at Cambridge University. Ever since then I have been deeply fascinated by the structure of this incredible language," says ShaoLan. Some of my earliest and most treasured memories are of my mother showing me the beauty, shape and form of Chinese characters. "I grew up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher. (If you go to the Facebook page, you have to start from the bottom of the timeline and work up, because the lesson follows a particular order.) She's also published a charming placeholder of a Web site here.
In the meantime, she has published a Facebook page introducing her concept. She says she's gotten more than a thousand emails and LinkedIn invites since then from people who want to get started.
ShaoLan introduced her system in a rousingly well-received TED talk in February in Long Beach, Calif., the video of which should go live in May.
0 kommentar(er)
