Start here: three paths through Kungfucius

Kungfucius has a few hundred pages and no wish to make you read them in order. Pick the path that describes you today. Each one is a short reading order, and you can change paths whenever life does.

Path 1: you are choosing a language

You have not committed yet, or you are wondering whether you picked the right one. Decide with facts first and enthusiasm second, since enthusiasm is what you will need for the following few thousand hours.

1. Start with the side-by-side comparisons of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Vietnamese and others.
2. See where each language lands in the difficulty ranking, and why.
3. Read the honest verdict on the one that tempts you: how hard is Chinese, how hard is Japanese or how hard is Korean.
4. Then check the calendar: how long it takes to learn a language, with the official estimates and what they leave out.

If the numbers do not put you off, you have chosen well. If they do, better now than in month eight.

Path 2: you are learning already and want better methods

You have an app streak, a shelf of textbooks and a suspicion that there must be a more efficient way. There is, and it is mostly about doing fewer things with more attention.

1. Get most of your hours from material you can follow: comprehensible input.
2. Make new words stay with spaced repetition, without letting the flashcards take over your day.
3. Collect your cards from real sentences, not from lists: sentence mining.
4. Train your mouth and ear together with shadowing.
5. If progress has stalled somewhere after the beginner stage, read about the intermediate plateau before you blame yourself.
6. Pick tools last. The review of Anki is a good place to start, and the rest of the toolbox is linked from there.

One method done daily beats five methods admired from a distance.

Path 3: you are heading to Asia or already there

You have a ticket, a job offer, a scholarship or a partner's family to impress. The language now has a deadline, and the culture has opinions about how you behave.

1. Begin with the Asia section, which has the pages on China, Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia.
2. Studying Mandarin on site? Compare the Mandarin schools in Taiwan.
3. Learn the Chinese phrases you will need in the first week. Japanese and Korean have their own phrase pages under each language.
4. Survive the first business dinner: drinking culture in China.
5. Find your people at polyglot events.
6. If a university, visa or employer wants a certificate, the exam guides cover HSK, TOCFL, JLPT and TOPIK.

Arriving with fifty phrases and good table manners puts you ahead of most newcomers, and well ahead of where Kungfucius once started.

Not sure which path is yours

Take Path 1 if you are still deciding, Path 2 if you study on most days, and Path 3 if a date is already fixed. The paths cross, so nothing is lost by starting on the wrong one.

Kungfucius also writes an occasional newsletter for those who would like the next good page to find them.