For my first interview, I wanted to introduce the legendary Jim Rogers and ask him his thoughts on learning Mandarin Chinese and what it was like to relocate his family all the way from New York to Singapore. He was very generous to give a few minutes out of his busy schedule to answer some of my questions. Jim Rogers is an American investor and financial commentator now based in Singapore. He wa...

There’s now a new way to watch Japanese TV shows if you’re not in Japan. I recently heard about this thing called jibtv from TokyoCooney (check out his YouTube channel) and thought it would be a good thing to share. You can tune in to the jibtv streaming internet channel to watch a variety of Japanese programs. They have a pretty wide variety of shows that are educational and enterta...

As much as you might enjoy reviewing your SRS flashcards, watching foreign movies, reading your foreign language books, or whatever you do to learn Chinese and/or Japanese (or any language for that matter), you can’t learn it all on your own. You need some friends to help you. In theory you could learn everything on your own, I think, but you’re just making life harder for yourself that way. R...

It’s said that there are about 50,000 kanji in existence. Thank god we only need to know a thousand or two of those! Does that make you feel any better? Probably not. Learning the kanji is the hardest part about Japanese. I think it’s even more difficult than learning them for Chinese since Japanese places multiple pronunciations on each character. It’s like twice or three times ...

Look into Gordons eyes and see his confidence glare! Wafangdian English Language Super School might be silly but we have to start somewhere. That’s kind of how I feel about my blog. I’m not an authority on learning Chinese or Japanese, but I am confident that I can still help people a lot. And for everyone who is learning, remember to stay confident. That will help you with anything yo...

Everyone learning Japanese and Chinese should watch more cartoons and TV dramas! Normally I would never suggest that to anybody, since the first thing that comes to mind are pea-brain couch potatoes watching soaps, but we’re trying to learn some difficult languages here! Also, I’m talking about some quality programs. Some good Chinese & Japanese anime, movies, and dramas. You can ...

This is the first of many book reviews I’ll do in the My Zousho series. Zousho (蔵書、ぞうしょ) means library or book collection. I’m going to take you through every book in my library that I’ve used to learn Japanese. I think these books will give you some good ideas and direction for learning. If you follow my path for learning Japanese you will definitely learn a lot in a short...

If you’re trying to learn Chinese then I can’t stress enough how you should be using ChinesePod. Whenever someone first asks me how to learn Chinese I tell them to start there. I started learning Chinese with their podcast lessons in June of 2006 and I still use them on a daily basis. In my opinion, it’s the BEST resource you will find for learning Chinese. ChinesePod is part o...

Here are two more great tools to help you learn Japanese. As long as you use Firefox as your internet browser, you will find these tools to be really handy and convenient. They’ll help you save time and create a more passive learning experience. The first tool is Rikaichan. Rikaichan is a firefox add-on that translates Japanese to English. Just hover the mouse on top of a word, and a popup a...

I’m glad you’ve decided to follow my advice and start using a spaced repetition system (SRS). Remember that this is a very simple concept that everyone can be successful with. Just put in the small amount of time to set up your SRS and dedicate some time to using it every day. If you still haven’t read Part 1, then please do that before continuing. First thing you need to do is download some...