About the Author

Irish native Benny Lewis speaks over ten languages - all self-taught. In 2003, he spoke only one language: English. After university, he moved to Spain and was soon frustrated that he could not speak Spanish after six months of studying. So he decided to abandon traditional learning approaches and just start speaking - and everything changed. Today Benny is known as The Irish Polyglot and speaks Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Hungarian. He is the author of the bestselling book on language learning, Fluent in 3 months. He also runs the largest language learning blog in the world, www.fluentin3months.com, where he breaks down the language learning process for busy people. Lewis is a full-time 'language hacker', and devotes his time to finding better, faster, and more efficient ways to learn languages. For the first time, he has applied his methods to helping people learn specific languages in his new Language Hacking series.

Dr. Licheng Gu is a professor of Chinese language instruction at Northwestern University. Besides numerous articles and book chapters, Professor Gu has published three books in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language: Picture Characters: Learning Chinese through Pictographs in 2006, "Learning Chinese with Lulu and Maomao" in 2008, and "An Analysis of Chinese Teaching in American Universities: Its Past, Present, and Future" in 2019. He is highly recognized in Chinese language teacher training at home and abroad. Thanks for this contribution to the field, he is invited to serve as Visiting Professor at Beijing Language and Culture University. Professor Gu is also the China Liaison in the Office of Vice President for International Relations of Northwestern University.