Chineasy: The New Way to Read Chinese

I bought this for my son who had to take compulsory Chinese lessons in his first year at secondary school. This book was recommended by the teachers there and I can see why.It's a great book for learning the basics. It gives you simple examples of how words are formed and give you easy, image heavy icons on how to remember what the letters and words are. These techniques really simplify the learning process and help you to store the information in your mind palace!If you have to take Chinese as a language or just have a vague interest in the language then you won't go far wrong with this book.

Chineasy is a great book that teaches vocabulary in order of the visual construction of the characters, rather than in order of word frequency. Thus, you might learn 人 person (“person”, a standard introductory word) followed by 从 (“to follow”: one person behind the other) and 众 (“crowd”: three people), neither of which you would normally learn so early. I found this a very helpful way to learn characters quickly and remember them much better.One downside to this is that you learn a lot of words that you are unlikely to be using any time soon, such as 人鱼 “mermaid”, 小鬼 “imp” and 公主 “princess”. Moreover, my Chinese friends tell me that a lot of words in the book are archaic, such as 犬 “dog” (which, in that case, I suppose might be translated more like “hound”?), and the book does not always mention this. That said, it is still useful to learn 犬 because the next character that follows is 吠, which is a combination of 口 “mouth” and 犬 and means “to bark”.So while this character build up is useful, the book seems to miss on some obvious combinations and related characters that are a lot more frequent than, say, “mermaid”. For instance, it covers both 手 “hand” and 机 “machine” but not 手机 “mobile phone”; 酉 “wine vessel” (archaic) and 酒 alcohol (which adds 氵, the radical for water), but not the very common character 西 “west”; it covers both 明 “bright” and 白 “white” but not 明白 “to understand”, etc. In fact, there is very little overlap between the vocabulary covered in Chineasy and the vocabulary from the HSK vocabulary lists (which are organized by frequency).Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this book and it helped me quickstart my character learning. I would recommend it and if a second volume ever came out I would definitely buy it.

You wouldn't want to use this as your *only* source of information about chinese characters but as a complement to other learning activities it's really lovely. The method of using memorable images to embed the characters in is fun as well as well grounded in research, and the ways that characters combine to form new meanings is very interesting. The stories told around that are yet another aide to learning. The book is also very well produced - nice smooth cover, and an elastic to keep the pages neat when travelling with it, or mark your place. A very inventive and welcome addition to the learning materials available! I wish ShaoLan much success and further product line extensions.

According to a Chinese friend, a lot of this book is old Chinese that is no longer used and not very useful for a modern learner

Bought this book after seeing the author on TED talks. It’s a lovely visual book and quickly builds your repertoire of symbols whilst explaining a little of the history behind each one. I found it fascinating and easy.

I have just started my classes in Mandarin and so was looking for texts to help in both language and writing, and this obviously fell into the later. Being a graphic designer and educational technoligist myself this really appealed to me. Although having had this for less than a week I absolutely love it:) Perfect mix of graphic design to aid understanding, my only small gripe is that book uses numeric rather than glyphs for tones in pinyin, but that is a small point based on my teacher and my text book using glyphs and to be honest given the small type face used for pinyin probably was well advised to use numerous :)

A several people have advised me: "One must have a child imagination in order to learn Chinese characters". As an adult I have somewhat forgotten the ways of a child, but thanks to this book it's no problem at all. I'm just eager to finish the book and see the first results. I hope to see other and progressive continuation of the work of ShaoLan! Keep up with the excellent work!

This book helps me to learn Chinese characters. It helps of remember the characters with great visuals.It lost a star because it sometimes seems more interested in looking good and arty layout than in being clear. For example it's not easy to read print n brown pages (but not many brown pages). Tone numbers are rather small.But I wish this book had been around when I first started learning characters.