I help adults and kids to unlock Chinese characters 10x more effectively through pictures and stories such that they make sense, become meaningful, and hence memorable.
That's what I do.
Keep reading if you want to learn more about my story and why I share my knowledge to help others.
I’ll share the following with you;
- What I realized when I first started to teach my own kids Chinese here in the U.S.
- The big problem I encountered
- The solution I found
- How I discovered my passion
- What happened in 2020 after the Covid-19 lockdown
- How I want to help you to learn Chinese 10x more effectively.
- My love for Totoro
Okay, I will tell you my story.
(But you'll have to promise to tell me yours later, okay?)
“Learning should be about EXCITEMENT, not work.”
-Michel Thomas
How I Got Started & My Problem
I started to teach my kids Chinese at home here in the States when they started 2nd and 3rd grade, respectively.
To entice them to learn, we drew pictographs together like this:
- One - 一 is represented by one line.
- Two - 二 is represented by two lines.
- Three - 三 by three lines.
- Person - 人 looks like a person standing nice and tall on two feet.
- Mouth - 口 resembles the shape of a wide-open mouth.
- Mountain - 山 takes the shape of a three-peaked mountain.
The simple yet striking visuals appealed to them immediately. But we quickly ran out of pictographic characters that could be easily understood by a sketch drawing.
After my initial success getting them on board, I quickly realized that this sketch drawing method is not scalable to learning 3,000 Chinese characters, which will give you above 95% proficiency level for daily speaking and reading.
BTW, does 3,000 sound like an achievable goal compared to the fact that 13,000 words is the vocab size of an elementary school graduate in an English-speaking country, according to research by The Economist of two million vocabulary test results?
After talking to parents who had sent their kids to immersion programs or Sunday Chinese school, the pattern of disenchanted learning was very obvious.
Today’s learners are still taught in the same learn-by-rote method as decades ago.
Do you know what the most frequent complaint I heard was?
“I forgot…” “It’s too hard.”
A mom told me, “My 7-year-old daughter wrote herself to tears when practicing writing the character for ‘putting on a hat – 戴’. It just does not make sense to her.”
Adult learners don’t seem to have any better method either but resort to sheer willpower by copying down each character 30-40 times to make it stick.
And you know what?
It works, but it’s just not fun to do, and it costs a lot, a lot of time. (The officially recommended time to learn 150 characters to pass the HSK Level 1 test is 300 hours, according to Han Ban, China’s language bureau for overseas Chinese learning.)
Yet you are still vulnerable to one BIG problem – forgetting!
To make things seem even more impossible when the learners don’t see the immediate application of what they have learned to life, their motivation tanks.
It’s hard to get motivated when social learning is not in place. (I also get it. You don’t want to learn if your peers are not there learning with you. 😔)
I immediately stopped my home teaching to my boys, not willing to risk the danger of ruining their curiosity for their heritage language.
And… this stop took more than four years.
Every day on my mind during these years was just one thing:
Find a way to make learning Chinese characters easier, with less time, more effective, more meaningful, and retaining more… definitely not like filling a basket with water, as the author of Ultra Learning, Scott Young, says.
You may ask, is it enough just to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese without learning the characters?
The answer is (like in almost all other cases) – It depends. (Pardon me for such a cliché.)
If you are traveling to China, Taiwan, or Hong Kong next week and want to grab a quick bite of conversational Chinese, then no, you don’t have to learn Chinese characters for that specific purpose (you can’t, anyway). (But just be prepared to experience a sense of inability to engage as the memory champion Joshua Foer related to his travel to China.)
However, for my purpose – to raise my kids to be fluent Chinese readers and writers, skipping the characters is not an option.
What I wanted
I was just sick and tired of hard memorization.
I was sick and tired of learning-by-rote.
Quoting a Chinese expression, it’s like “stuffing down the duck.”
It is boring, ineffective, and easy to forget.
Learning a language requires sufficient comprehensible input, as the renowned linguist Stephen Krashen has theorized.
The keyword here is COMPREHENSIBLE.
For English speakers who are used to reading words in the alphabet, squared tofu-looking Chinese characters are indeed as impenetrable as the Great Wall.
Yet it is very common to see textbooks for even beginners densely covered with characters, making learners feel overwhelmed and intimidated.
Coming from the field of User Interface Design, I couldn’t help thinking…
Gosh… Is this a comprehensible interface? Certainly not a user-friendly interface.
I wanted an interface that would help learners make sense of themselves.
Instead of insisting on the learners memorizing the random-looking characters and forgetting them in a few hours,
Instead of having the learners persevere through mindless copying down, hoping to strengthen the input signal,
I wanted a method that would make sense and, hence comprehensible to them.
I wanted a method that would help learners gain the critical “memory mass” quickly enough before the tide of memory attrition washed away bits and pieces of discrete input signals.
That’s when I discovered Oracle Bone Scripts.
My mind was just blown with all the possibilities.
(It felt like a shining torch shedding light onto a dark tunnel.)
Why weren’t we taught like this before?
Learning Chinese characters through the original visual symbols is sooooo much easier. As the old saying goes, a picture says more than a thousand words.
On top of that, each character has its originating story to tell, which reveals the fascinating history of civilization, and…ancient wisdom.
After all, we humans are sense-making animals. When things make sense to us, we naturally remember them.
I dived deep into the best etymological analysis, sequenced the DNA of modern-day Chinese characters, and innovated on a methodology that is based on the very nature of written Chinese being essentially a pictographic language.
(Yes, beyond the 10% simple pictographs, you could UNLOCK a vector of complex ones, which I’ll soon address below.)
Some Significant Things I Learned:
- Visual First. Visualize the characters first so that the strokes do not look strange and arbitrary anymore.
- Meaning is the Key. Knowing the original meaning of a character is the key to unlocking not only 10X more complex characters, but also allows you to peel off the multiple semantic layers of the same character, a thorny issue that has troubled many intermediate to advanced learners. (I have a separate section addressing this in more detail below.)
- Even the Pronunciation is Not at All Random. There is certainly a pattern to follow.
- The Necessity of Tapping into the Rich Reservoir of Your Own First Language Sense.
- Learn it the Right Way. The cost is your time, effort, and morale, in addition to monetary investment.
Applying these principles, I published my first storybook embedding 150 Chinese characters and phrases into the adventure story of a teenage boy named “Yi,” meaning one.
(Given my zero background in publishing, it was indeed an experiment for me.)
Despite my zero-budget marketing and publicity effort, readers’ positive responses were truly authentic and heart-warming.
(Wow! Seeing my experiment really works for people!)
During one of my book signing events, a man in his 50s said to me sheepishly that he was a lifelong dyslexic, but my book totally made sense to him, and he recognized a lot of characters by “not even trying.”
Seeing past these encouraging reviews, what I saw behind each review was a learner’s true struggles in his/her previous ineffective learning experience.
I was determined to improve on a streamlined, effective learning system to help out whoever was interested in learning Chinese.
So in the summer of 2019, I went to the TEDx stage and gave a talk entitled: Learn Chinese in the 21st Century: Grow Yourself a Chinese Language Tree.
Imagine this…
Imagine yourself growing a Chinese language tree from its root - 300 essential Oracle Bone Script characters, grow branches and leaves, bear low-hanging fruits first, and gradually 3,000 fruits all over the tree.
This tree does not grow anywhere else but in your brain.
It will become part of the neural network in your brain.
That’s so cool!
If you consider yourself at or above intermediate level, the next section is very relevant to you. Otherwise, you may want to skip the next section as it is way over your head.
What Advanced Learners Complain About Most
My native speaker’s intuition also tells me something more complicated down the road awaits the learners as they advance a bit more.
My intuition soon proved to be right as I started to analyze error-prone areas among Chinese learners across age groups.
One pattern is what I call "semantic layering".
Since there are only 3,000 commonly used Chinese characters to express what in English is accomplished by 13,000 words. The density of meaning or multiple meanings carried by one character in various contexts is obviously much higher.
This results in multiple semantic entries in one given character or word.
For example, the English word “case” could mean 1) instance, as in a case study; 2) a protective container, as in a suitcase; or 3) argument, as in a strong case for climate change.
An American student who spent over two years in China learning Chinese and just passed HSK3 confided that after slaying an initial couple of hundreds of characters, he was suddenly thrown to face a totally different beast.
As he recalled, I clearly knew each one of these characters, yet when they appeared together in a phrase, it had a totally different meaning. It felt like I had to remember them all over again.
A simple example would be this frequent character 周. When learners initially encountered it, it means a day of the week as in 周日 (Sunday). However, sooner or later, they will come across the same character in many different contexts such as 周长 (circumference), 周全 (thorough), 周朝 (Zhou Dynasty), 周期 (cycle period), 众所周知 (everyone knows), 周身疼痛 (whole body aches), 周旋 (deal with), forcing the learners to memorize each every one of them from scratch.
Research in Cognitive Science has informed us that learning and memory require the formation of new neural networks in the brain. A key mechanism underlying this process is connecting neurons into networks.
This explains why discrete pieces of new information are much harder to understand and remember than new information that can be associated with or linked to existing knowledge networks.
In the example above, with traditional learning methods, these phrases are scattered across bits and pieces of reading texts over a couple of years of intensive learning. Each time the learner encounters one phrase, only the specific meaning in that context is remembered as a discrete piece of information, not associated with those before or after.
A popular Chinese expression 学了后面忘了前面 vividly describes this common forgetting phenomenon in learning.
If the learner could know the original meaning of the character 周, which gives its inherent core meaning – the semantic DNA of this character, then all phrases suddenly become meaningful, starting to make sense.
The original meaning of the character 周 turns out to be a fascinating story about ancient agricultural practices and the beginning of agricultural society.
As you can imagine, this type of deep learning does not take a couple of years. It could be accomplished in just a couple of months.
And…
It is accomplished in just a couple of months.
I’ll share the story of what happened after the Covid-19 shutdown in the following section.
Fast Forward to 2020
In mid-March, the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to stay at home, moving schools and many business activities online.
For the first time in four years, I finally had the opportunity to have my boys follow the Chinestory curriculum besides their busy schedule with band, orchestra, and tennis training.
The results were remarkable.
From the end of March to the end of May, on school days, they spent 45~60 mins on Chinestory’s Quizlet study sets. By the end of the two months, they not only aced the YCT level 4 test, and HSK level 3 test, but most importantly, became independent readers of simple Chinese books.
On Jonathan’s 12th birthday, he said this year he was most proud that he could become literate in Chinese in just a short two months.
Why I Care & How I’m Going to Help You
My boys are not the only two students I have taught, of course.
In late March, I discovered this wonderful learning platform called Outschool, which connected me to eager and curious learners from all over the world, from the Torrey pine coast of California to the Gold Coast of Australia, from the Middle East to the Netherlands.
Through spring and summer, I taught over 250 students and earned over 80 5-star reviews.
One of my 7th graders, who had zero background in learning Chinese (literally her first Chinese lesson), passed her YCT level 1 test in just less than two weeks!
That’s just epic.