A groundbreaking approach to learning how to read and write Chinese by transforming the key Chinese characters into pictograms to make them easy to remember. Chinese is one of the oldest written languages, and one of the most impenetrable, especially for Westerners. China's growing cultural and economic influences are spurring strong interest in learning this ideogrammatic language among schools, businesses, entrepreneurs, and travelers. It is the ideal time to introduce Chineasy. Breaking down the Great Wall of Language, author ShaoLan Hsueh has used her entrepreneurial and cultural background to unpick Chinese characters and create a simple system for quickly understanding the basic building blocks of the written language. Working with renowned illustrator Noma Bar, she has turned these Chinese characters into pictograms that are engaging and delightful and easy to remember. The book begins by teaching the key characters, called radicals, upon which the language is built. A second section shows how these radicals can be combined to form a wealth of new words and even phrases. The final section presents three stories - a fairy tale, an Asian legend, and a contemporary fable - told using the radicals introduced in the book. In fewer than two hundred pages, readers of all ages will be able to navigate a Chinese menu, read signs and billboards, and grasp the meaning of most articles in a Chinese newspaper. Future books will build on this first one teaching an expanding repertoire of Chinese characters through pictograms. Learning and reading Chinese has never been more fun and easy.