Over the following three years, she broke down her mother tongue into smaller building blocks and began drawing colourfully illustrated flash cards.

Her system, Chineasy, basically starts backwards, teaching the easiest rather than the most commonly used characters first. This is so as not to scare off new learners.

Chineasy was not initially intended for the wider public, but the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response in May this year to Hsueh's TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk on the method convinced her to go all out. Her campaign on online funding platform, Kickstarter, to sponsor learning Chinese "the easiest way" has just ended with 5,475 supporters pledging GBP £197,630 (HK$2.4 million).

A book is on its way with an app to follow. But Shaolan says her method is not about money, but building bridges.

I grew up in an artistic family, so I grew up learning, practising and appreciating traditional Chinese characters. When I moved to the UK and encouraged my children to appreciate the language as much as we do, and to recognise the characters to read and write - it was just impossible. I tried various initiatives to encourage them to learn but it just wasn't effective. So I decided to do it myself.

I thought that there must be some way to make it easier. So I spent lots of evenings identifying and breaking down characters and prioritised the key building blocks. If you know, for instance, the top eight building blocks you can build another 30-40 characters straight away. Then those 30-40 characters will allow you to build a few more phrases. It's a very fast learning curve.

To be honest - everyone. My initiative was intended for my children, but then I took it on as a full-time task after my TED talk. I didn't think about who the audience was, but on my Facebook page and newsletter I have a total of 35,000 followers. My youngest audience member is four years old, and many children do it because of their parents, and the whole family decides to learn Chinese together. It's a great family activity. If I look at the demography, it's about 60 per cent male aged 20-45, and at the same time, I have lots of pensioners who are still actively learning. The oldest one I know of is an 89-year-old. Another group of people I have is very small but one that has touched me the most - parents of children with learning difficulties. When they said that looking at my pictures had worked, they couldn't believe it and burst into tears. I too burst into tears reading their e-mails.

I have lived in the UK for 12 years now, and the moment I moved there, I stopped speaking Chinese for three years. I immersed myself in the English environment totally, and while Chinese is still my native language, that was my commitment. The moment I came I put myself in a Westerner's shoes, and took in each vocabulary, each idiom that expressed the thinking and mentality of the West. My friends said I was more European than most Europeans, but at the same time I felt I was more Taiwanese than ever. I started looking back to my own country and own roots in a way that most people wouldn't.

It's totally different. The way I learned is the same way that all people in Taiwan learn. We spoke fluently before we knew how to read, and when we went to school, we had to learn a set of symbols before we could learn the characters. Knowing this, we just needed to memorise them and how to pronounce each one correctly for between one to 1½ years. Then we got textbooks with symbols for pronunciation and characters on the other side and learnt each character the hard way. It's all about repetition.

At the moment, I'm finishing a book which will give people a very good foundation. After my Kickstarter campaign is done, I will start recording the sounds and pronunciations to go with the website. My other idea is to teach people how to write by using animation. My Kickstarter movie has three examples showing people how strokes work. My next ambition is to teach people how to speak. I have lots of ideas and I'm getting very excited about that, but at the moment, I have to deliver what I am committed to for my Kickstarter backers. Also, my friends are crying out for an app so I need to do that. Most of my content is out there for free - commercial profitability is not my objective, but I want to make Chineasy a sustainable venture. I want to treat it as an arts design project and an educational project. If it were a commercial project, I would have done it entirely differently.

Yes and no. I know it's a project that can help a lot of people. Chineasy is unique in many ways. There are many other great methods out there, but nothing is like Chineasy. I set the target at £75,000 because it's a big language and I know it takes a lot to make a language accessible. There are lots of costs associated with animations, the e-book and printing. I'm not backed by anyone, so it's quite a drain on my personal resources, and I was relieved to see that Kickstarters were willing to be part of this.

I'd say probably one year. I'm finishing my book now, and after reading it, you will be able to construct sentences such as "My grandfather travelled from Japan on May 3", "My younger sister got married in Tokyo", or "The little mermaid burst into tears". You may not be able to read a children's book from cover to cover, but I'd say you'd get a really high hit rate with the characters you recognise. If you take a few weeks with my book, you will know about 400 characters.

It's correct that I exclude some of the most common characters. Because of the building block system, a lot of common characters like the ones for "up" or "down" will not be included in the building block flow. I'm not worried about that because they are random characters. If you know the character for "mouth" and then put together three "mouths", it's a very common word, meaning product, item. There is no effort to learn an extra character. I try to capture as much as possible in the shortest time span. This system is the most efficient method. The thing is that when you bring in a complicated character it seems challenging and people don't want to learn. I try to make it easy and fun with this method. If there are no obstacles, people are intrigued and they're willing to learn. With very little effort they know a few hundred characters and have a real understanding of how the language works. I will introduce those tricky but common characters to them later.