Learn Chinese, Cute-Style

ShaoLan Hsueh wanted to make learning to write in Chinese easy — or at least as easy as it could be considering the thousands and thousands of characters the language uses. Her new book Chineasy uses cute, colorful illustrations to help students learn the characters for basic words like bug and deer.

Head over to NPR’s CodeSwitch blog to see some of those illustrations and read more about the metaphorical meanings behind the characters. For example, the word for “prison” is apparently the same as the word for “cow,” but with a line on top fencing it in. And the character for “quarrel” is the character for “woman” repeated twice, so, thanks for that, Chinese.