Dr. Ash holds a Ph.D. in Chinese from National Taiwan Normal University, where he specialized in Chinese paleography and historical linguistics. The Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters grew directly out of his dissertation research, and he is the principal author and researcher. His goal in creating the dictionary was to explain clearly and simply how each character actually represents sound and meaning, since this is coherent with the #1 rule of effective learning: that the object of learning is understood and has meaning to the student. This was accomplished by making use of Ash's systematic study of character origins and evolution. He’s also studied more than a dozen languages over the past 30 years—including Dutch, Mandarin, Cantonese, German, Japanese, and European Portuguese—and treats language learning as a kind of lifelong experiment: always looking for faster, better, and more effective ways to learn.

Before co-founding Outlier with Dr. Ash, John studied Linguistics and Paleography in the Graduate Institute of Chinese at National Taiwan Normal University. He co-founded and later ran the Taipei Classical Chinese Reading Group, a weekly reading group consisting mostly of graduate Sinology students from western universities. He also taught classical Chinese to members of the group who had no previous instruction in the language. His coursework and research focused on excavated Warring States bamboo texts, historical Chinese character morphology, and the Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字 and its commentaries and criticism.