This beautifully illustrated book starts at the very basic level, but one gets easily immersed into the lovely stories and pictures. A few moments later you realise you learned a lot in a very pleasurable way. This book can be recommended to a very wide audience of readers.

Anthony Su's beautiful illustrations interweave with Haiyan Fan's well-crafted story to build a memorable understanding of the Chinese characters. Designed for children and adults alike, Chinestory creates a delightful scaffold for learning Chinese!

This multifaceted masterpiece offers a fresh and easy way to learn and enjoy the beauty of Chinese language and culture. Not only does the book connect traditional Chinese artwork styles to a captivating story highlighting Chinese heritage (context, culture), but the contents also explore the unseen roots of the Chinese language, uniquely displaying the evolution of the characters from their etymological origin.

A wonderful present for learners of Chinese language and culture. Pedagogical design such as the layering of the semantics of the Chinese characters, the stroke-by-stroke writing system are innovative and instructive. Such pedagogical innovations are in line with well-established theories in the linguistics field, most notably Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, the Schemata Theory (Winograd, 1977), the Noticing Theory (Schmit, 1990), the Connectionism Theory (McCarthy, 2006).