Making Chinese easier by dissecting its pictographic roots

The building block for Fire (火) pictographically represents a central flame with two smaller sparks on either side of it. It also looks like a campfire.[Photo/chineasy.org]

What seemed daunting at first, turned out to be fun. ShaoLan's mother was a calligrapher and as a child she had always been fascinated by the beauty of the characters. She was also deeply interested in Chinese culture — the history, language and literature — so it was only natural for her to riddle out how the characters came to look as they did.

A new way to learn Chinese goes back to pictographic roots

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"When I see things I see patterns," she said. "When I see Chinese characters, I try to identify the patterns."

In London, she started to break down Chinese characters — which are composed of one to four or five "building blocks" — by the hundreds, then thousands, first on paper and eventually on a computer as the task grew geometrically.

What evolved was a kind of three-dimensional interactive matrix that looks like something out of a science fiction movie.

"So you can see that each character is made of many other components," she explained. "Once you understand the correlation, it is actually much easier."

For example, the character for "burning" is made out of one "fire" and two "trees".

The characters "woman" and "mouth" together mean "obey". "It says a lot about Chinese history and historical reference," Shao Lan said.