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.

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.

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

Very good. I think by learning this course it is already nearly half of TOCFL A1.

Moreover the example don't have any subtitle so we will force to remember previous course and help to remember more chinese vocabs.

Thank you NTU and 竺靜華老師

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UPDATED : I passed TOCFL A2 for both listening and reading (score 62 and 61 respectively). I only learn from this course and A Course in Contemporary Chinese Book 1&2, without any extra paid course. Thank you Coursera, NTU and 竺靜華老師

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

great videos and easy-to-understand materials

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!

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.

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!

Essential for beginners. Helped me to start writing, loved every class.

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').

*extremely* example-focused; nothing is really explained. some people may like this, but it doesn't fit my personal style of learning.

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!

Very well structured, easy to follow, professional and also enjoyable. I'm gonna miss it, I wish there were a course 2.

Very good if you want to learn Mandarin in a Taiwanese accent and not mainland simplified.

Thank you so much!

谢谢 你们!

非常好

little difficult for a beginner

I have mixed feelings about this course. For someone just starting out with Chinese this can take a lot of time. I have been living in Taiwan for over 7 years now, so I could already understand some vocab and my listening has had some practice since being around Mandarin speakers daily. This course seems to be meant to learn by listening and using context clues to figure out the meaning. I would have liked to learn more of HOW to form sentences. The last set of videos the teacher spoke quite quickly, so it was hard to follow the text on the screen. Overall, I did learn some basic, every day life sentences and vocab.

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.

In my opinion, the courses is so difficult for foreigner. There will be many hours to understand what the lecture says. Especially for beginner, it still hard to understand.

It's very difficult. And I can't pass the quiz. I would like to have more explanations for each sample.

Texts and words are too small in exercises for this course to be effective.