ted summary and reflection

LEARN TO READ CHINESE....WITH EASE

By shaolan

Summarized by Najmiatul Fauza

In this posting I would like to summary and give a little bit reflection on the speech by Shaolan Hsueh.

Ms shaolan is Taiwanese. As a daughter of a calligrapher, on her treasured memories. Her mother showed her the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters. From then, she was fascinated by the Chinese. She started thinking about how new fast method of learning Chinese might be useful. Sin age of five, she learned how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence.

A Chinese scholar would understand 20.000 characters. We only need 1000 to understand the basic literacy. The top 200 will allow us to comprehend 40% of basic literature enough to read signs, restaurant menus. She started with 8 characters to show how the method worked.

·         the pictures above represent the symbol of fire,tree,the sun, the moon, person, mouth, door and mountain.

those characters above are radical. They are building blocks for creating lots more characters:

·         Person

if someone walks behind, that is “to follow”, two people is “company”, three people is the symbol for “crowd”. If a person stretched their arms wide it is called “big”. The symbol of people inside the mouth is called as ”the prisoner”.

·         Tree

One tree is called as “a tree”, the symbol of two tress together are “woods”, three tree together are the symbol of “the forest”. A plank below a tree that mean “foundation” and the symbol of the mouth above the tree is “idiot”.

·         Fire

The symbol of two fires together is called as “hot”, three fires together is called as “flame”, the symbol of fires under two tress is called as “burning”.

·         The sun

The sun is the source of prosperity. Two suns together “prosperous”, three suns “sparkles”. The symbol of the sun and the moon together is called as “brightness” and “tomorrow”, after a day and a night. The symbol of the sun is coming up above the horizon is called as ”sunrise”.

·         Door

Putting the plank inside a door that called ”door bolt” , then the symbol of the mouth inside the door is “asking question”. The person is sneaking out of the door is called as “evading”.

·         Woman

Two women together is the symbol of “argument”, three women together is called as “adultery”.

After knowing the basic characters , so the phrases can be built. For instance, the symbol of the mountain and the fire together is called as volcano.

Finally after listening to her speech, unconsciously that we have learned more than 30 characters. The method used is very helpful to learn Chinese easily. As we know that Chinese has complex structures, so we need a fast and effective method to learn it.