I do think she misrepresents the benchmarks for success as you have said yourself, this is nigh on unforgivable. (In fact she does so in the video as well, she uses 众.) I haven’t got the books but I do have a set of flashcards given to me by a friend. I have also heard that the resources themselves mix scripts to be best fit the images, granted this is is made clear in the books, but seems contrived and counter productive in the long run. It’s probably just the first well publicised effort at using this kind of mnemonic system for learning Chinese, as the language is “relatively” in vogue for the first time. As many others have pointed out, her method is FAR from new or innovative. I find that many people who are unfamiliar with Asian languages find them intimidating, and I applaud anyone who tries to make Chinese language fun. In any case, even though I disagree with her benchmarks for success, I really like that Hsueh has attempted to make Chinese written language somewhat more accessible to foreigners. I hope this doesn’t put anyone off learning Chinese, but I have studied formally for five years and probably recognize somewhere between 1,500 – 2,000 characters, and I still struggle with reading menus and newspapers, just because of the sheer volume of characters in use today. And, according to Hsueh, if you can recognize the most basic 200 characters, than you have achieved “basic comprehension”, enabling you to read menus, most signs, etc… Personally, I think Hsueh has a relatively low bar for what “basic comprehension” means. She also mentions that if you know 1,000 characters, you have achieved basic literacy in Chinese. Hsueh uses the traditional variant, that looks like this: 門Īs opposed to the simplified version that looks like this: 门 This is apparent when you look at the character “door”. It’s important to remember that since she is from Taiwan, Hsueh is actually using traditional characters instead of the simplified characters that are used in mainland China. After my TED talk in 2013, many native Chinese speaking people came forward to me in the conference and told me how much they. It is an arts project that is the culmination of my life’s journey between traditional and modern, as well as through the East and West. And you can check out the Chineasy website as well if you’re interested. Chineasy for me is a return to my artistic upbringing, and technology background. You can learn more about Hsueh’s background on the TED website.

Chineasy ted talk