I am a first-time learner of Chinese, with no background knowledge. While the material itself is not difficult, I found this course incredibly difficult due to the teaching format.

New vocabulary is introduced in-context, however the video role plays in which they were introduced were at times very unclear, and in many scenarios I could not hear the audio clearly. I had to pre-teach new vocabulary to myself using other resources before beginning the lesson to comprehend what was happening. Each lesson teaches about 40-50 new words, which I found to be overwhelming with not enough tasks provided to really practice the new words. This course also teaches traditional characters, not simplified ones, which made memorization very difficult, and reading a struggle that, in the end, made me lose motivation. As a first-time learner, I do not know if this is how Chinese is usually taught, or if it was a choice made by the course instructor. I also would have appreciated some time dedicated to learning correct stroke order.

While the teacher is clearly very passionate about teaching Chinese, and the course uses many interesting and at times funny video role plays, I found the course difficult for the above reasons. I will continue to learn Chinese, but perhaps through another platform. I hope some of the information I learned in this course with help me in my studies.

Thank you to the course creators for all their hard work making this course, and I hope I provided some helpful feedback for future courses.

some grammars and characters are not taught during the course but still appear in the tests

great videos and easy-to-understand materials

Some really nice elements. Good structure and examples. However, sometimes it's really hard to guess what something means without translation and then you're lost. Some parts are a bit fast and it requires a lot of manual work with external tools to keep up.

Course is good but for a person who understands only english, there should be english subtitles for every word spoken in chinese in the videos. Subtitles are available for what tutor speaks but there is no subtitles for conversations between students in videos. i expected full subtitles.

It is purely in Chinese language so difficult to keep invested although subtitles are there but very small. Also the quiz questions are also not good and repetitive

instructor from start speaks in chinese. who would be able to learn chinese when you from start are not able to know what she is saying

Thank you for creating this course. Please create more! I wish there were more Chinese courses on Coursera from taiwan, using traditional characters. Most of them are from China, would love a more Taiwanese presence!

it's really very useful. Not really for beginners...but if you are lower than hsk1 this course really improve your listening skills. Absolute Amazing! Thank you Taiwan University!

Bien écrit, merci pour les sous-titres. Les vidéos sont excellents, particulièrement les acteurs, qui sont adorables. Merci pour vos efforts, vive le mandarin de Taïwan!

谢谢 你们!

非常好

little difficult for a beginner

Far from suitable as an introduction: the immersion technique alone would be overwhelming and demotivating for complete beginners, but there are also problems with the synchronisation of video clips and questions. However, this course is suitable for revision: the video clips contain natural, comprehensible speech and the characters introduced should mostly be at a suitable level for anyone using it for that purpose, as I did. It's also good to find usable vocabulary for online messaging and texting - something often omitted from other courses. To become an effective introduction to the language, much, much more repetition would be necessary.

A great course, however, a bit advanced for those that are completely new to Mandarin Chinese. English translations within the video as well as in the transcripts would be very helpful. Also, some of the end of week quiz questions are confusing because the don't provide any context for the question (for example, a question of "what is the boy doing" without any text or pictures to provide context, but answers that are are all plausible such as 'taking a walk', 'reading a book', 'eating a snack').

The visual aids for learning what each character means are really inconsistent and there is no explanation of how grammar works. They teach you a few words and then in the tests ask you to make sentences from those words. I'm glad I went into this already knowing a bit of Chinese or I would have been completely lost.

The framework and teaching methods seem very well done. Unfortunately, it's lacking in English subtitles and/or materials, which I was desperately trying to volunteer and add. However, I can't seem to add "English" into my translation account profile. I've already added Chinese (Traditional).

In the interim, I've added some translations into the respective forums which I hope other students will find useful.

The instructor has excellent pronunciation for all the words presented. The additional staff add interesting and sometimes hilarious skits to introduce new sentences to Chinese learners. (Kudos to the American staffer/actor. His Chinese pronunciation is awesome!)

Hopefully, this course will be updated and pass QA before the next iteration. Thank you and hopefully more will follow!

Suggestion - As an option, please include ZhuYin phonetics in the course. Thank you!

great way to learn chinese. a bit higher than beginner level, but worth the effort to take this course, you will learn quite a bit of characters. i didn't see many traditional character courses, but even if there were other courses i'm sure this one would still be one of the best ones. use of nontraditional methods of learning with video examples, dialogue, and online games is really thinking outside of the box compared to other courses. i've signed up for other coursera courses and probably never completed them. this class and another one are the only ones that i have completed, so keeping the learner interested in the material, and the instructor are the factors that i believe helped me complete this course.

Great course. I started with some vocabulary already known, but picked up new vocabulary during this course. Being fully taught in Chinese helped me with my listening skills, and being online meant I could always pause, go back, or play slower if I needed to. The clips with the actors and visual aids were very helpful. I found the 'rearrange' questions in the tests the hardest part, and almost always answered these incorrectly. Otherwise, the course was at a suitable level of challenge for me. If there was another course which adds to this I would definitely do it as well.

Very entertaining and educational at the same time. Thougj there were certain words used that were not introduced as vocabulary, I still find it helpful to take note of them. This course is pretty easy for people who already have a background on the language. But the grammar portion at the latter part is a bit challenging. Thank you for expanding my horizon and helping me review my Chinese language skill.

I learned a lot about tones. I listened carefully entire sentences in order to get the main idea. I also enjoyed to discover how some words slightly change their tone into a sentence. Finally, I also loved to see traditional characters. Thank you so much. (P.S. Great job, guys. You're awesome teachers!)

Really great course, immerses you in Mandarin and forces you to really listen and learn through observation and intuition. Also teaches you words/phrases that are commonly used which is really helpful. xie xie ni men!

I had so much fun learning Chinese with this course.

The quality of the contents are very high, I could catch a lot of conversations from native speakers.

It was also a great course for reviewing Chinese skills.

I increased considerably my vocabulary. I really recommend you to take this course, the videos that are developed for the course are well done and all of them are really helpful. Nice course!

really nice and smooth course, if it have english subtitles it would be great, also i managed to understand most new words without translation(only symbol and meaning)