很多老外都認為漢語是世界上最難學習的語言，一個個方塊字在他們眼里就是一幅幅復雜的圖案。但是薛曉嵐相信漢語并沒有大多數人所想的那么難學，她用巧妙有趣的插圖生動展示漢字的意思，并開發識字卡游戲教漢語學習者遣詞造句。她說：“認識一兩個字就能衍生出三四個字，掌握幾十個就能知道幾百個，掌握50到70個字就能認識上千個字。”

By Chris Davis

Chineasy founder ShaoLan Hsueh is on a mission to break down the language barrier surrounding Chinese any way she can.
Chineasy的創始人薛曉嵐一直在盡其所能打破學習漢語的障礙。

She started with the book Chineasy: The New Way to Read Chinese, released in the US in 2014, which basically teaches the meaning of about 400 essential characters by encasing them in clever and often amusing illustrations (created by a team of artists at her headquarters in London).
她著手編寫的漢語教材《Chineasy：The New Way to Read Chinese》2014年在美國出版。書中用巧妙有趣的插圖展示了約400個基礎漢字的意思（由她在倫敦的設計師團隊創造）。

From there she dissects each one and reassembles it, demonstrating how the Chinese language is put together. Hao, the word for good, for instance, is a combination of the character for woman and boy, suggesting motherhood is a good thing. The term for eating is an open space representing a mouth and next to it the squiggle for begging.
她把書中的字拆分重組，展示漢語是如何組成的。例如：“好”，指一切美好的事物，由一“女”一“子”組合而成，意為母愛為善。“吃”字一邊打開的“口”代表著嘴，旁邊的曲線代表“乞”。

ShaoLan is convinced that Chinese is a lot easier than most people think and her goal is to get beginners a basic knowledge of 1,000 or so characters quickly. She points out that the government in China requires that people should be able to read newspapers with just 1,500 characters, while university students need a few thousand.
薛曉嵐相信漢語并沒有大多數人所想的那么難學，她的目標是讓初學者快速掌握1000多個漢字。她指出中國政府要求國民掌握1500字，可閱讀報紙，而大學生則需要掌握幾千字。

She's shooting for something in between and hoping the “network effect” will guide students from there. “Knowing one or two [characters] you can create three or four; knowing tens you can make hundreds; knowing 50 or 70 you can create thousands,” she said.
她的奮斗目標介于兩者之間，并希望“網狀效應”能引導學生做到。她說：“認識一兩個字就能衍生出三四個字，掌握幾十個就能知道幾百個，掌握50到70個字就能認識幾千個字。”

She has been sharing her approach with educators and students the world over for years (to the tune of 400,000 followers on facebook), garnering feedback and suggestions and her latest tool is a board game called Chineasy Tiles: Play to Learn Chinese.
薛曉嵐（Facebook粉絲多達40萬人）多年來一直與世界各地的教育家和學生分享她的方法，并收集反饋和建議。她最新開發的教學工具是一款名為Chineasy Tiles：Play to Learn Chinese的棋盤游戲。

Conceived after extensive testing of hundreds of groups of non-Chinese speakers by teams in London, at MIT and other classrooms around the world, the game uses 48 “essential character” tiles: rain, woods, good, not/no, dog, white and so on, with their give-away illustration and English word on one side and the plain character with pin yin term on the back.
薛曉嵐團隊對來自麻省理工學院以及世界各區的其他課堂上數百名母語非漢語的外國人進行了廣泛測試。這款游戲里通過48張“基礎字”卡片：雨，木，好，不，狗，白等等，其中一面是表示含義的插圖和英文單詞，另一面是漢字和拼音。

In a youtube demonstration, ShaoLan demonstrates how easily rudimentary sentences can come together using the tiles as building blocks. Eat plus big means “eat like a pig”. Small plus eat means snack, or street food. Cow plus water means buffalo.
在一段YouTube視頻教程中，薛曉嵐展示了如何以這些字為基礎輕松構成簡單句。“吃”和“大”組在一起表示“大吃（eat like a pig）”；“小”和“吃”組成“小吃（零食）”；“牛”遇到“水”就有了“水牛（buffalo）”。

No plus eat plus cow plus meat… you get the idea. But the brilliance of the Chineasy approach is that it emphasizes the pluses of the language for an outsider: there is no grammar, no tense, no “he or she” gender and no hard-and-fast ordering of words in a sentence.
那么“不+吃+牛+肉……”，你就能知道它的意思是“不吃牛肉”了。Chineasy學習法的明智之處就在于，它向不熟悉這門語言的人強調了“疊加”的作用：沒有語法，沒有時態，沒有性別區分，沒有詞語順序的硬性規定。

The game set comes with a set of large tiles and a game board and a sack of smaller tiles with five-by-five racks for playing a version of Chineasy Bingo. ShaoLan said that 1,500 teachers worldwide are coming up with new games and ways to use the pieces.
這套游戲中共有一套大的字卡，一張游戲板以及一套較小的字卡。五行五列的游戲板則是用來玩Chineasy Bingo游戲。薛曉嵐說現在全世界有1500名教師在研究這套卡片的新玩法。

ShaoLan said she is flattered that some people have been calling Chineseasy “the alphabet of Chinese.”
薛曉嵐說，當有人說Chineasy是“漢語版字母表”的時候，她感到受寵若驚。

“But we're not there yet,” she said. “We don't cover all 200,000 characters, just aim for a very basic literacy by knowing a few thousand quickly.
“但任重而道遠，”她說，“我們沒有完全覆蓋20萬個漢字，只想讓學生快速掌握幾千個基礎漢字后培養基本的識字能力。”

英文來源：“CHINA DAILY”微信公眾號

翻譯：謝秋睿（中國日報網愛新聞iNews譯者）
編審：丹妮 董靜
音頻編輯：焦潔
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Author

Chris Davis, senior correspondent at China Daily.