TED - Learn to read Chinese ... with ease! | ShaoLan

Growing up in Taiwan as a daughter of a calligrapher, one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty, the shape, and the form of Chinese characters. Ever since then, I was fascinated by this incredible language. But to an outsider, it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. Over the past few years, I've been wondering if I can break down this wall, so that anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language can do so. I started thinking about how a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful. Since the age of five, I started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence. I learned new characters every day during the course of the next 15 years. Since we only have five minutes, it is better that we have a fast and simpler way. A Chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters. You only need 1,000 to understand basic literacy. The top 200 will allow you to comprehend 40% of basic literature, enough to read a Chinese restaurant menu and to understand the basic idea of web pages or newspapers. Today I'm going to start with eight characters to show you how the method works. Are you ready? Open your mouth as wide as possible until it's square. You get a mouth. This is a person going for a walk. Person. If you imagine the shape of the character for fire as a person with two arms on both sides, as if she were yelling frantically, "Help! I'm on fire," that works. The symbol actually originally came from the shape of the flame, but I like to think of it that way. Whichever works for you. This is a tree. Tree. This is the mountain, the sun, the moon. The symbol of the door looks like a pair of saloon doors in the Wild West. I call these eight characters radicals. They are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters. A person: if someone walks behind, then the person is to follow. As the old saying goes, two is company, three is a crowd. If a person stretches the arms wide, this person is saying it was this big. The person inside the mouth, the person is trapped. He's a prisoner, just like Jonah inside the whale. One tree is a tree. Two trees together, we have the woods. Three trees together, we create the forest. Put a plank underneath the tree, we have the foundation. Put a mouth on the top of the tree. That's idiot. It's easy to remember, since a talking tree is pretty idiotic. Remember fire? Two fires together, I get really hot. Three fires together, that's a lot of flames. Set the fire underneath the two trees, and it's burning for us. The sun is the source of prosperity. Two suns together, prosperous. Three together, that's the sparkles. Put the sun and the moon shining together, and it's brightness. It also means tomorrow, after a day and a night. The sun is coming up above the horizon: sunrise. A door. Put the plank inside the door, and we store a boat for the mouth inside the door, asking questions. Knock, knock, knock. Is anyone home? This person is sneaking out of a door, escaping, evading. On the left we have a woman. Two women together, they have an argument. Three women together, be careful. It's adultery. So we have gone through almost 30 characters. By using this method, the first eight radicals will allow you to build 32. The next group of eight characters will build an extra 32. So with very little effort, you will be able to learn a couple hundred characters, which is about what a Chinese eight-year-old knows. After we know the characters, we start building phrases. For example, the mountain and the fire together give us fire mountain. It's a volcano. We know Japan is the land of the rising sun. This is the sun, paired with the origin, because Japan lies in the east of China. So the sun and origin together build Japan. A person behind Japan: what have we got? Japanese person. The character on the left is two mountains stacked on top of each other. In ancient China, that meant exile, because Chinese emperors put their political enemies in exile beyond the mountains. Nowadays, exile has turned into getting out. A mouth, which tells you where to get out, is an exit. This is a slide to remind me that I should stop talking and get off the stage. Thank you.