Water image courtesy of Chineasy.org

To me China is a country of contrast:
Enormous areas of natural beauty versus cities full of smog; villages full of skilled artisans versus huge factories creating design copies; lovely omnipresent culture versus a questionable approach to human rights; farmers with ox-carts versus state-of-the-art skyscrapers... -Somehow i can't really put my finger on this land of Mao.  (Maybe just as well, since it's Enormous)

Mountain image courtesy of Chineasy.org

Mouth image courtesy of Chineasy.org

Political situations aside, i've always loved Chinese characters -unless they're not tattooed on someones body-, but have never been able to make anything of them.

Luckily for me Taiwan-born ShaoLan teamed up with graphic artist Noma Bar (from Israel) to create 'Chineasy'.
After spotting the lovely graphics on Pinterest i was sourced back to Dezeen.com, where ShaoLan is quoted as follows:

"I created a methodology that breaks down thousands of Chinese characters into a few hundred base building blocks," explained ShaoLan. "When these building blocks are combined, they form compounds that can in turn be combined to create phrases. Through this method learners can quickly build a large vocabulary of characters with very little effort." 

Everyday image courtesy of Chineasy.org

'Quickly build a large vocabulary of characters with very little effort' - i'm up for that!

The book is published by Thames & Hudson and can be ordered online, for more information about the project check out the Chineasy website.
Just ordered a copy myself, i'll get back to you as soon as the mailman delivered it to my roof.
(i mean doorstep, obviously, but didn't find the right character)

Roof image courtesy of Chineasy.org