Chineasy: Visual-based learning for Chinese

As a Chinese student, I like the way this website introduces new characters, since many Chinese characters evolve from abstractions of real objects. I also appreciate how the designer uses traditional Chinese chars instead of Simplified: Simplified chars have less connection with the shape of the object it stands for, or its meaning. And in my view, they are not as beautiful as the traditional ones. However, somet advice for Chinese learners: Most people in mainland China use Simplified Chinese instead of Traditional. So if you want to communicate with people from Beijing or Shanghai you'd better learn Simplified Chinese well.

It's a little late for me as I've just worked my way through the 1500 most common characters using Skritter but I do love this highly graphical approach. Reminds me a bit of the Heisig system (which I haven't actually done myself).

Some of the statements in the text are a little dubious. For example, that you only need 1,000 characters for basic literacy and that with the top 200 characters you can read forty percent of Chinese popular literature.

I've read elsewhere that 1,500 characters is considered the minimum for basic literacy (a university graduate will usually know 3,000 or more). Even if 40 percent of the words in a given book make use of the top 200 characters, that only means you might occasionally recognize the odd character here and there. The meaning of the text will certainly still be utterly incomprehensible.

I highly suggest that in this day and age, you teach using simplified characters. For entire swaths (not to mention the overwhelming majority) of Chinese people out there, simplified is the way to go.

Beautiful. Is this your project? If so, what are your plans for it?