Come sit by me, dear.

I'm Dottie, and I've spent a lifetime at the mahjong table — long enough to know that the game was never really about the tiles. It's about the three women sitting across from you, and what happens to a Tuesday when it has a table at the center of it. If you've been looking for the game, welcome. If you've been looking for the people — the laughing, snacking, celebrating-your-first-mahjong people — oh, honey. You've found us.

Everything in my little shop was made for one purpose: to get you from bewildered to belonging, at your own pace, with nobody rushing you and nothing left unexplained.

Browse the shop   Meet Dottie

How I'll walk you there

Most mahjong materials teach the card line by line, which is how perfectly intelligent women decide they're "just not card people." Nonsense. I teach the logic underneath — the handful of shapes the card reuses over and over, the little phrases that make them stick, and the table sense that turns rules into instincts. You'll learn in drills, not lectures; you'll laugh more than you expect; and one afternoon soon a hand will simply assemble itself under your fingers and you'll look up at three new friends who are already clapping.

Start where you are

This isn't a queue, dear. It's six rungs, and there is no wrong one to step onto first. A woman who has played since the Carter administration and a woman who has never held a tile both belong here. They start in different places, that's all. Find the sentence below that sounds like your Tuesday.

Rungs five and six aren't harder than the ones below them. They're a different job. Plenty of players stop at three and are perfectly happy there, and I'd never nag a woman who has found the thing she came for.

Stay close

Once a month I send a short letter — a drill, a story from the table, first word on new tools like the Tournament Organizer. No noise, no nonsense, unsubscribe anytime with my blessing.

Dottie's story

I learned the game the way the lucky ones do: underfoot. My mother's group met Thursdays — card tables in the living room, the good candy dish out, four women who had seen each other through everything the world could think to throw. I was supposed to be doing homework. Instead I sat beneath the table matching the clack of the tiles to the rhythm of their talk, and by twelve I could read a discard pile better than I could read a room. When they finally dealt me in, I understood I hadn't just joined a game. I'd been handed a seat in something older and warmer than I had words for.

The name came later. I always did favor the dots — clean, honest, easy to count on, which is everything I ask of a tile or a friend — and the girls started calling me Dottie for it. It stuck harder than my given name ever did.

The decades since have been one long apprenticeship to this game. I've played the year's card every year it's been printed since I was old enough to buy my own — and you should see my bookshelf. I've sat tournament tables and kitchen tables, played through new babies and lost husbands, taught in living rooms, rec rooms, synagogue basements, and once, memorably, a hospital waiting room where nobody wanted to check the clock. I've made the 75-point hand more times than is polite to mention, which is why the artist drew me holding it. And I have learned the two great truths of American mahjong: the card always makes sense eventually, and the friendships always arrive before the skill does.

What I believe about teaching

I believe the card is a map, not a test. Fifty-five lines sounds like an examination; eight familiar shapes wearing different numbers sounds like a neighborhood, and I teach it as one — we stroll it together, street by street, until you know which houses welcome your tiles.

I believe drills beat lectures ten to one, that a memory phrase said aloud is worth a page of explanation, and that nobody ever learned this game while feeling foolish. So at my table, questions are never silly, first mahjongs are applauded loudly enough to alarm the neighbors, and the only house rule that cannot be repealed is kindness.

I believe in your own card in your own hands — we never photocopy, dear; the League that makes the card earns its fifteen dollars every year — and I believe the fastest way to learn is beside other learners. Which is why everything I make points the same direction: toward a table with people around it.

How I teach

Gently, in order, and with snacks. We start with your thirteen tiles and the five headline counts, not with rules — you'll be reading a hand the first afternoon. Then the shapes, one family at a time, each with its phrase, each phrase sticking a dozen lines to your memory at once. Then the craft: the Charleston as a conversation, the discard pile as a newspaper, defense as good manners with teeth. By the time we're through, you don't remember the card. You recognize it — the way you recognize a friend's kitchen.

And when you call your first mahjong — and you will — I want to hear about it. That inbox is the happiest place I own. — D.

The shop

Everything below is a piece of my table, packed to travel. Guides arrive as beautifully printable files, delivered to your email by a real person (me) — usually the same day, always with a note. Every study guide is designed to sit beside your own current-year card, never to replace it.

Bundles, because friends don't shop alone

The shelf is open: eleven titles are on sale now — the Card Companion, both Playbooks, the Beginner and Advanced Beginner books, Your First Tournament, the League Builder Kit, the Practice Tile Set, and three drill decks: Deal & Decide, Read & React, and The Pivot. Every listing has a little "look inside" flip-through waiting for you. The rest of the shelf is coming soon, dear.

Pre-order the 2027 editions

The Dottie's Mahj™ Community

Buy a guide and you've bought a book. Join the Community and you've pulled up a chair. Every customer is invited; membership costs nothing but your first name.

Where to play — community games

Standing games, open tables, and classes around Rochester and southeast Minnesota. These are community-run gatherings — bring your current card, a sharp eye, and a friendly spirit.

Find your people

Our registered leagues run real seasons — standings, playoffs, banquets, the works — in towns across the country, and every one of them keeps a teaching table warm for beginners. Write to DottiesMahj@gmail.com and I'll tell you what's near you. Nothing near you yet? Then, dear, you may be three friends away from being a founder: the League Builder Kit walks you from four players to a published season, and registering your league with us is free forever.

Teach with me

If you've ever explained the Charleston twice in one afternoon without sighing, you may be an instructor at heart. The MAHJ curricula give you eighteen planned sessions from first tile to expert tempo, and registered instructors get first look at everything new. The teaching table is the best seat in the house — I've sat in it forty years and never once been bored.

Questions, stories, first-mahjong announcements: DottiesMahj@gmail.com. Questions are never silly at this table.

Dottie's Mahj™ Instructors

Every teacher on this page has passed my qualification quiz, finished the twelve-lesson Instructor Course, and graduated by passing the final exam. When you book one of them, dear, you're booking my method with a different chair at the head of the table — and I vouch for every one.

The instructor directory

Karen Weathersbee  ·  Rochester, Minnesota

Dottie's Mahj Instructor · Teacher's Teacher

Fifteen years at the table, ten of them teaching — Karen offers private and small-group lessons covering any of the Dottie's Mahj curricula (MAHJ 101, 201, or 301) or special topics of your choosing: defensive play, offensive play, and Charleston strategy. And as one of our Teacher's Teachers, she offers an in-person or distance-based course leading to Dottie's Mahj Instructor status — if the other side of the table is calling you, Karen is the one who walks you there.

Book with Karen: KJWMahj@gmail.com · 507-910-8852
Booking lessons? Leave a message with your name, your town, and what you'd like to learn, and Karen will call you back.

The Class Finder

Tell me what you're looking for and I'll point you to the instructors who teach it.

The instructors' room — coming soon

Teach with me

Here's what stops most good players from teaching: not nerve, and not knowledge. It's the fifty hours between deciding to teach and having something to teach from. Somebody has to decide what comes first, build the drills, write the homework, make the slides, and work out what to do when a student says she can't memorize. Most people never get past that, and the game is poorer for it.

I already did all of it. That's what this program is.

What opens up

A Dottie's Mahj Instructor doesn't walk away with a lesson plan. She walks into a room that has my whole teaching shelf in it, and she keeps her key as I add to it.

MAHJ 101, the beginner curriculum, opens the day you start the Instructor Course — so you can teach your first table while you're still learning to teach it. MAHJ 201 and MAHJ 301, the intermediate and expert courses, open when you pass the final exam.

Every course arrives finished. Each session has its objective written, its drill designed, its homework assigned, and its presentation deck built and branded — forty-six class hours of prepared material across the three. The mnemonics are tested. The lesson order is the one that works, not the one I happened to learn in. When a student tells you she can't memorize, the course has already taught you the three different things she might mean and the drill for each.

Alongside the curricula: the Instructor's Library, your listing in the instructor directory and the Class Finder so students can book you directly, the monthly instructor letter, a seat in the instructors' community when it opens, and a place in the pool I draw from when each new card's materials need reading before anyone else sees them.

You walk into your first class with a plan for every minute of it. That is the thing you're buying.

How you get there

The qualification quiz, $10 an attempt. Twenty questions on the guides. It isn't a formality — it's how I know you know the material well enough for the rest to land.

The Dottie's Mahj Instructor Course, $149. Twelve lessons on the method itself: how to teach the card without losing the room, how to diagnose a memory failure, how to run a drill, how to correct a woman in front of three other women without costing her the afternoon. MAHJ 101 opens here.

The final exam, $50 an attempt. Twenty-five questions, and 80% graduates you. Passing brings your certificate, your badge, and the password that opens MAHJ 201 and 301.

Then the subscription keeps your directory listing live, your classes in the Class Finder, and the letter arriving: $19 a month or $190 a year, cancel any time, no hard feelings ever.

Join the subscription   Take the qualification quiz — $10 per attempt

Your certificate and badge say you finished my program and teach my curricula under my name. That is what they say, and it's all they say — there's no national qualification in American mahjong for them to stand in for. What they open is the shelf.

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