老外在中国：掌握汉语竟能如此简单

很多老外都认为汉语是世界上最难学习的语言，一个个方块字在他们眼里就是一幅幅复杂的图案。但是薛晓岚相信汉语并没有大多数人所想的那么难学，她用巧妙有趣的插图生动展示汉字的意思，并开发识字卡游戏教汉语学习者遣词造句。她说：“认识一两个字就能衍生出三四个字，掌握几十个就能知道几百个，掌握50到70个字就能认识上千个字。”

By Chris Davis

Chineasy founder ShaoLan Hsueh is on a mission to break down the language barrier surrounding Chinese any way she can.

Chineasy的创始人薛晓岚一直在尽其所能打破学习汉语的障碍。

She started with the book Chineasy: The New Way to Read Chinese, released in the US in 2017, 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).

她着手编写的汉语教材《Chineasy：The New Way to Read Chinese》2017年在美国出版。书中用巧妙有趣的插图展示了约400个基础汉字的意思（由她在伦敦的设计师团队创造）。

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.

她把书中的字拆分重组，展示汉语是如何组成的。例如：“好”，指一切美好的事物，由一“女”一“子”组合而成，意为母爱为善。“吃”字一边打开的“口”代表着嘴，旁边的曲线代表“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.

薛晓岚相信汉语并没有大多数人所想的那么难学，她的目标是让初学者快速掌握1000多个汉字。她指出中国政府要求国民掌握1500字，可阅读报纸，而大学生则需要掌握几千字。

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.

她的奋斗目标介于两者之间，并希望“网状效应”能引导学生做到。她说：“认识一两个字就能衍生出三四个字，掌握几十个就能知道几百个，掌握50到70个字就能认识几千个字。”

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.

薛晓岚（Facebook粉丝多达40万人）多年来一直与世界各地的教育家和学生分享她的方法，并收集反馈和建议。她最新开发的教学工具是一款名为Chineasy Tiles：Play to Learn Chinese的棋盘游戏。

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.

薛晓岚团队对来自麻省理工学院以及世界各区的其他课堂上数百名母语非汉语的外国人进行了广泛测试。这款游戏里通过48张“基础字”卡片：雨，木，好，不，狗，白等等，其中一面是表示含义的插图和英文单词，另一面是汉字和拼音。

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视频教程中，薛晓岚展示了如何以这些字为基础轻松构成简单句。“吃”和“大”组在一起表示“大吃（eat like a pig）”；“小”和“吃”组成“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学习法的明智之处就在于，它向不熟悉这门语言的人强调了“叠加”的作用：没有语法，没有时态，没有性别区分，没有词语顺序的硬性规定。

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.

这套游戏中共有一套大的字卡，一张游戏板以及一套较小的字卡。五行五列的游戏板则是用来玩Chineasy Bingo游戏。薛晓岚说现在全世界有1500名教师在研究这套卡片的新玩法。

ShaoLan said she is flattered that some people have been calling Chineseasy “the alphabet of Chinese.”

薛晓岚说，当有人说Chineasy是“汉语版字母表”的时候，她感到受宠若惊。

“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.

“但任重而道远，”她说，“我们没有完全覆盖20万个汉字，只想让学生快速掌握几千个基础汉字后培养基本的识字能力。”