Summary of 'Learn to Read Chinese...with Ease' by ShaoLan

ShaoLan is from Taiwan and a daughter of calligrapher. She tells us about how fast method to learn Chinese. She started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequenced. She learned new characters every day. A chinese scholar would understand 20000 characters. We only need 1000 to understand the basic literacy. The top 200 will allow us to comprehend 40% of basic literature. However, Shao started with eight.

When we open our mouth as wide as possible until it’s square, so we get the ‘mouth’. Drawing a person who is going for a walk, we get ‘person’. Drawing a person with two arms on both sides, it’s ‘fire’. Then, she shows us the symbol of tree, mountain, sun, moon, the symbol of the door which looks like a pair of saloon doors in the wild west.

After knowing the symbol of ‘person’, we can add drawing someone walks behind, means ‘follow’. If a person stretched their arms wide, it mean ‘big’. And still a lot of symbol.

By using this method, the first eight radicals will allow us to build 32. The next group of eight characters will build an extra 32. After we know the characters, we start building phrases. For example, the mountain and the fire together we have ‘fire mountain’.