East Asian languages are linguistically irrelevant and culturally distant languages for learners in US. How to gauge interests for learners in US to turn the irrelevance to relevance? How to cultivate intercultural understanding? The course aims to synergize the pedagogical insights from teaching and learning Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages from major research results, such as performance-based pedagogy, grammar instruction, metaphors of characters, writing system, pragmatic awareness, etc. It adopts a community-based approach to incorporate East Asian history in the local and Northern California communities, further develops learners and teachers’ awareness to draw the cultural distance closer. This course is a weekly three-hour seminar, with additional special topics workshops.