Here's what the director of the Chinese Language Program at a major American university says about Chineasy: Far from it, anyone who deceives him/herself into thinking that using Chineasy is a magic bullet for learning Chinese will simply be wasting his/her time. Hsueh had made some gigantic breakthrough in transforming the most daunting script on earth into child's play. I have tried to ignore this embarrassing (for the Chinese language teaching profession) campaign for the past year and more, but now I no longer can do so, since dozens of people - many of whom are otherwise intelligent and perceptive - have written to me suggesting that we now have a panacea for learning Chinese, as though Ms. Though this is a dubious goal for an adult, I'm certain that, using her methods, no one would ever reach it. If you spend just five minutes on this a day, in a year you will have the knowledge of an eight-year-old Chinese child." “It’s a key, a gateway, but it’s also cool and so much fun. Here's another example (which mixes up spoken and written language): " Be fluent in Chinese in a flash (card)" Quite the contrary, Chinese is the easiest language I ever learned to speak, but the writing system is by far the hardest I've ever had to grapple with.īut ShaoLan Hsueh's claims that written Chinese is a snap have flooded the airwaves. But learning to read the beautiful, often complex characters of the Chinese written language may be less difficult. Her performance on TED is prefaced by the following remark:įor foreigners, learning to speak Chinese is a hard task. Her efforts to promote the scheme got a huge boost from a successful appearance on TED in February, 2013. The creator of this alleged method for learning Chinese, ShaoLan Hsueh, seems to have unlimited access to the media. It is true that her system is "simplistic", but it is not true that people who use it "learn to read Chinese", despite her repeated claim that "it works."ĭuring the last year or so, I feel as though we've been bombarded with publicity for "Chineasy". The article is preceded by a video that begins with this note:Įntrepreneur and author ShaoLan Hsueh has devised a simplistic method for teaching English speakers to learn to read Chinese. " A New Way to Learn Chinese: Entrepreneur ShaoLan Hsueh aims to bridge the gap between East and West by teaching Westerners how to read Chinese". Last Friday, the following article appeared in The Wall Street Journal:
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