Chineasy

Chinese is one of our oldest written languages, considered by many to be one of the most difficult to master, especially for Westerners. Spurred by China’s growing cultural and economic influences, there is a strong interest in learning this ideographic language, but how do we scale the Great Wall of an “alphabet” composed of symbols? Chineasy: The New Way to Read Chinese (Harper Design; on sale March 11, 2014) by ShaoLan Hsueh allows people to learn to read Chinese with a ground-breaking approach that transforms key Chinese characters into illustrations for easy recall and comprehension.

Helping Westerners leap the language barrier, ShaoLan used her entrepreneurial and cultural background to “decode” Chinese characters, creating a simple system for quickly understanding the basic building blocks of the written language. Working with renowned illustrator Noma Bar, she has turned key Chinese characters into pictographs that are engaging and easy to remember. She teaches these characters, the language’s foundation, and then shows how they can be combined to form new words and phrases. Wallpaper* Magazine has given CHINEASY its 2014 Design Award as “Life-Enhancer of the Year.”

In fewer than two hundred pages, readers of all ages will be able to navigate a Chinese menu, read signs and billboards, and begin to understand the meaning of basic articles in a Chinese newspaper.

ABOUT SHAOLAN HSUEH

ShaoLan Hsueh is a bestselling author and entrepreneur with extensive experience in both Asia and Europe. While studying for her MBA at 22 in Taiwan, she wrote four bestselling books on software that were named “Book of the Year.” At 24, she co-founded pAsia, one of the major Internet solution providers in Asia in the ‘90s. In 2005, after completing her second master’s degree at the University of Cambridge, she founded Caravel Capital in London to advise young technology companies. CHINEASY is for ShaoLan a return to her artistic upbringing, an arts project that is the culmination of her life’s journey through the East and West. For Westerners, CHINEASY is a unique, lively, and beautifully envisioned “new route” into China through its language.