Why a female tech entrepreneur invented a new way to learn Chinese
- Chineasy founder Shaolan Hsueh struggled to teach her UK-born kids Chinese with traditional materials, so she came up with her own
- Now she hopes the award-winning language platform can bridge gaps between East and West
Shaolan Hsueh’s educational background may be in science and international affairs, but there is no denying the creative streak in her DNA.
The 47-year-old Taiwan-born entrepreneur is best known for her Chinese language learning system Chineasy, which breaks down the often-complicated characters into simple, easy-to-remember pictograms: a king, queen, a blazing fire, a square-shaped mouth, each with the Chinese character for the word at the centre.
Hsueh, a confessed geek, relied on visual designers to create the pictograms, but she herself comes from a family with strong artistic tendencies. Her grandfather, Lin Pau-chia, is considered the godfather of ceramic arts in Taiwan, while her mother is a calligrapher. Her father, though a mathematician and engineer by training, also took up ceramics. Hsueh grew up watching them mould and glaze vases.
Instead of following in her family’s footsteps, Hsueh started out in another direction, and her life took many unexpected twists and turns before the idea for Chineasy came along.
“When I was young, I felt like a black sheep. I wanted to study science and I didn’t want to do anything artistic,” Hsueh says. “I grew up in a family that didn’t buy art. Everyone was a creator.”
Hsueh graduated from National Taiwan University in 1993 with a degree in agricultural chemistry, then landed a job in a bank.