Out of all the languages, Chinese is probably one of the most complex and hard to learn. In the traditional Chinese language, there is around 13,500 characters to memorize. But, if you’re a solar, you most likely know 20,000 characters. Really, though, you only need 1,000 to have a mostly complete understating of Chinese. As ShaoLan (the creator of Chineasy) explains in her TED talk, 200 characters will get you around easily enough in China. Chineasy uses only 8 basic characters to get you to the goal of 200. Easily.

Chineasy brings the pictograms out of the Chinese language. To an outsider (and even most people that can read Chinese), the Chinese is more of a art than a language. The symbols look like random lines placed around each other. But way back when the ancient Chinese designed these symbols, they actually thought about it. Chineasy cleverly illustrates 8 basic characters. Here they are:

The 8 Basic Characters

Even though they are self-explanatory (which is the whole point of Chineasy), this is what the characters mean from left to right: Fire, Tree, Son, Moon, Person, Mouth, Door, Mountain. Memorizing pictures for all 100,000 characters would not help that much, would it, though? Fortunately, that’s not how the Chinese language is built. For instance, if you take tree, and put another tree beside it, you make wood(s). Then, if you put a third tree on top, you get forest. You can do this for all 8 character, though not exactly in the same way (example: a moon plus another moon equals prosperous because Chinese believe that the moon brings prosperity). So when you’re done memorizing all these characters and their different versions, you will have memorized at least 70 – 100 words. But, it doesn’t stop there.

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The Character For Crater

The way chinese is built allows you to build off of the word you know by making phrases. Not in the English sense. A phrase would be a word like volcano. In Chinese you write it like “fire mountain” which uses the 2 basic words fire and mountain. Plus, to even add on that, there is the word crater, which is written “fire mountain mouth”. There are many many more phrases to follow, so many that they would easily get you to 200 characters. Once you have these characters, you will be able to get the main point of 40% of the Chinese newspapers and things like that. Defiantly good enough for a trip to China. Unfortunately, ShaoLan hasn’t made any real apps or courses yet for Chineasy. But when she does, it will make learning Chinese fun. And easy.