Inspired by her own journey through personal challenges and by a passion to bridge cultural divides, serial entrepreneur Cheryl Mainland’s Dragon Academy aims to make Chinese learning as trendy and accessible as Korean and Japanese
The cat does not play the piano. What does your horse think? My pillow does not speak. The trees are wearing white jackets. These sentences rank among the most hilariously meaningless taught by Duolingo, according to a popular Reddit thread posted last year. While silly on the surface, serial entrepreneur Cheryl Lee Mainland, who has taken on the mission to make learning Chinese cool, sees this as a reflection of a deeper issue.
“On Duolingo, there are about 2 million active users learning Chinese and it keeps growing—but the fact is, very few of these people can actually speak Chinese,” she says. “It’s because a lot of these apps are not built to teach you how to interact with people.”
It is true that traditional Chinese classes often don’t capture students’ interest as well as they should and apps like Duolingo still fall short when it comes to bridging that all-important gap. Instead, Mandarin instruction continues to carry an outdated, stereotypical reputation—one that doesn’t really reflect how relevant and dynamic the language is today.
“Schools are full of kids who’ve studied Chinese for nearly a decade but can’t use it in everyday conversations because the system doesn’t give them the confidence or skills to speak Mandarin in real life,” she says.
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Back in the Shang Dynasty, (人), rén, was carved into oracle bones to represent a person—a simple side profile of someone standing (Photo: courtesy of Dragon Academy)
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Enter Dragon Academy, Mainland’s innovative language platform that feels more like a social media app than a traditional classroom. Created by a global team of educators, creatives, and technologists, it combines books, comics, AI animations and a gamified app to make learning Chinese practical and engaging. “Our goal is that every login offers something you can use immediately,” she says.
The platform’s approach reflects modern Chinese usage, embracing mixed-language expression and meeting learners where they are—lowering barriers and reflecting how many young people already use Chinese. It’s built on a root-to-branch method, starting with characters and expanding to vocabulary, idioms and culture—all woven into a vast storyverse based on Mainland’s own teenage epic novel series.
This storytelling element introduces a kind of soft power to Chinese education, much like K-pop for Korean or manga for Japanese. The story follows nine teenagers from different countries, united by their ability to speak Chinese, to save the world.
But the Dragon Academy’s story isn’t just the plot of the teenage epic novel series, but also mirrors Mainland’s own journey.
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