Chinese-American actor Daniel Wu has opened accounts on Chinese social media platforms, including Douyin and Xiaohongshu (RedNote), to promote his English course, according to Chinanews . As of last week, the account had more than 1.13 million followers on Douyin, with the most popular videos receiving up to 723,000 likes.

The course is a collaboration between Beijing-based education group Gaotu Techedu and Yashi Education Technology, an education company founded by Wu himself.

Born in 1974 in San Francisco (USA), Daniel Wu is a famous actor, director, producer and has been praised for his standard American English accent.

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Actor Daniel Wu has attracted attention on Chinese social media after launching a course to teach fans how to communicate in standard English. Photo: SCMP

In a video posted by the account “Daniel Wu Teaches English” on various Chinese social media platforms, the actor introduces himself as someone who grew up in California, earned an architecture degree from the University of Oregon (USA), and later turned to acting and directing. English, as a tool for communicating with the world, has always played an important role throughout his life, and now he wants to help more people improve their skills in the language.

According to SCMP, this course was sold for 398 yuan and within 48 hours of its launch, it had sales of more than 2 million yuan, then exceeded 5 million yuan within 5 days.

Some netizens are very interested in the course. Many others are skeptical about whether the videos are AI-generated or whether the course is really effective.

“The course consists of several parts with 84 lessons, 34 pronunciation lessons, and 25 phonetic transcription lessons. Each video lecture is 8-10 minutes long. The course is not difficult and mainly focuses on practical situations,” a 28-year-old self-taught English learner surnamed Wang who bought the course told the Global Times .

“However, in the 10-minute lesson, only 5 minutes are pre-recorded teaching videos of Daniel Wu, the rest are explanations from other teachers, mainly repeating what the actor said,” this user added.

According to Sixthtone , many course buyers have also expressed disappointment, complaining that the lectures are too simple and do not include much teaching from Wu. Keywords related to the course on social media platform Weibo have attracted more than 60 million views.

Shen Yi, a 37-year-old employee at an internet company, said he bought the course last week to prepare for an upcoming overseas trip and found the lessons too easy and not helpful.

“I was hoping for a more in-depth lesson that focused on specific situations, such as how to handle a wrong order at a restaurant or arguing about the bill,” Shen said. He also complained about the course using an AI chatbot trained on Daniel Wu’s voice and appearance: “If your answer is short, the AI’s response will be short too. People with weak English skills may have difficulty using this product effectively.”

Daniel Wu's foray into selling English courses online is not the first case of a celebrity pursuing a path related to education.

According to incomplete statistics from Beijing Business Daily, in the past decade, 13 celebrities in China have entered the education market, mainly focusing on language and music training.

In 2018, former CCTV anchor Zhang Quanling launched an app that offers Chinese training groups and online classes for children aged 5 to 15. In 2021, the singer created a music learning app, launching a 30-day singing course. Not only celebrities, Zhang Chaoyang - who has a PhD in physics from MIT (USA), founder of Chinese news site Sohu - has also livestreamed Physics lessons for the past 3 years.

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