If you have been looking around for resources to help you learn Chinese characters, you most likely have come across Chineasy. Chineasy, the “Award-Winning Chinese Learning Methodology,” is a system that teaches Chinese characters by overlaying them on top of fun little drawings that represent the meaning of the character.

So what’s wrong with that? Well, that’s not really how Chinese works. At least not for the most part.

Let me first mention the good things:

1. Great concept

I think that Chineasy is making a valiant effort to make the Chinese language more accessible. Most people I’ve spoken with were instantly intrigued by the concept, and loved how effortless it felt.

2. Beautiful design, simple user interface, fun animations

The book is beautiful, as are the cards and the app. It’s intuitive and easy.

3. Instant gratification

Chineasy gives learners the impression that they are making lightning speed progress, learning several characters in their first few minutes of exposure to the language — a remarkable feat.

And the bad? They’re bad. So bad that Chineasy’s benefits are instantly outweighed by its fatal flaws. There are a lot of issues, but I’m going to highlight three that I feel are the biggest.

1. Mixing traditional and simplified

There’s no good English equivalent that can really convey why this is so bad, but you should know that simplified and traditional characters are in many cases wildly different (i.e. 无 and 無, 发 and 發, 钥 and 鑰, etc.), and literally never used together (Wikipedia is a weird exception as it has contributors from different parts of the Chinese-speaking world).

Here, they teach a simplified character (从 vs 從):

And later in the same video, they teach a traditional character (门 vs 門):

It’s almost like mixing British and American spelling in one sentence, and learning it that way, but much more exaggerated. You either write in simplified, or traditional — never both.

2. Teaching all characters as if they were pictographs

The character for “fire” looks like a fire. The character for “person” looks like a person. The character for “mountain” looks like a mountain! Wow, Chinese is such an easy and logical language!

I hate to burst your bubble, but Chinese characters fall into several different categories, and this category, where the characters look like their meaning, is the smallest category representing only about 5% of characters. In fact, the vast majority are a combination of two radicals: one that represents the meaning, and one that represents the sound — and they look absolutely nothing like what they mean.

However, this doesn’t stop Chineasy from pretending that this is how Chinese works. They insist on cramming every character into a cute picture, whether it makes sense or not. Spoiler alert: it almost never does.

3. Teaching characters out of convenience, not utility

This may be the worst thing about the entire Chineasy teaching methodology.

Imagine you are walking through a park with your new friend who is just starting to learn English. A dog runs past you, and you turn to her and say, “Hound! That is a hound.”

You may be thinking, “Is it not a hound?” Well, yes, it is, but anyone in their right mind would teach the word “dog” literally years before teaching the word “hound.”

So why would this “award-winning” methodology make such a silly mistake? The reason is they teach words out of convenience. Take a look at this promotional video of theirs:Source: Chineasy YouTube channel

The first character they teach is 人 (rén), which means “person,” and is a perfectly acceptable character to teach to a beginner. No problem.

Next, they teach the character 从 (cóng), which, as Chineasy explains, means “to follow.” Once again, that is technically true, but it also has a lot of other meanings, and it tricks the learner into forming sentences like “我从你” which is really just an awkward sentence fragment. Most Chinese speakers would probably agree that the most common translation would be “from,” rather than “follow.”

Finally, they teach the word 众 (zhòng), which Chineasy claims to mean “crowd.” Aside from being a relatively uncommon character (surely not one that a beginner needs to know), the character has many different meanings, and is rarely used in isolation to mean “crowd.” Combined with other characters, it refers more commonly to things like “the general public,” or an audience.

Chineasy feels like it it was created by someone who learned the language by reading a dictionary and never actually spoke with a Mandarin speaker. Their methodology only really works for a very small subset of characters, but it doesn’t stop them from obsessively trying to bend and break the language to fit their methodology, rather than adapt the methodology to fit the language.

What do you think of Chineasy? Have you used it? Are you a fan? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Peace and love,

Sam