Why I built Luoji

For years, I joked that I had “Mandarin dyslexia.”

I could see the same character dozens of times on flashcards and still not recognise it the next day. Learning Mandarin felt like an endless cycle of memorising vocabulary, forgetting it, and starting all over again. I was always wondering why everyone else seemed to remember characters so much more easily than I could.

Then I met my teacher, Yuqi.

He didn’t just teach me more vocabulary. He taught me to see the logic behind Mandarin. Instead of treating every word as something to memorise, he showed me how characters are building blocks, how words are formed from those blocks, and how understanding them often helps you work out both the meaning and the pronunciation.

That way of learning completely changed my relationship with Mandarin. I realised I don’t learn best by memorising isolated facts—I learn by understanding how things fit together.

Suddenly, Mandarin stopped feeling impossible and became fascinating. The more I uncovered its patterns, the more I fell in love with the language. Its beautiful logic—how so much meaning can emerge from combining simple building blocks—is unlike anything I’ve encountered before.

That’s why I built Luoji (逻辑).

I wanted to create the app I wish I’d had from the beginning: one that helps you discover the beautiful logic of Mandarin, so that every new character makes the next one a little easier. I hope you’ll end up seeing what I see: not just a language to memorise, but an elegant system to explore.

Yuqi Wang

Mandarin teacher & method lead

Mandarin teacher for adult learners — 1,000 hours with 100+ students, from absolute beginner to advanced.

I came to teaching from theatre, as a director and writer trained at RADA. I advocate a method of learning built on etymology, structure and muscle memory: characters are read rather than memorised, sentences are understood as structures before vocabulary, and pronunciation is trained as a physical habit.

Much of how I run a lesson is imported from directing — I work on a learner's voice, rhythm and delivery the way I would work with a performer on a text.