As a person that has had some Chinese exposure before and after some of these lessons, I find them informative, yet still much in want. Some things the instructor explain was done poorly, others in good understanding. I can't complain about the lack of hanyu writing, but to randomly have them in the notes in the self studies was less than helpful towards the self lessons. Overall, I still consider this a good course to start off anyone and easy and simple enough to break them into bigger and better studies with it.

The course is just brilliantly structured. I imagine that this is a set of expressions to start a journey of love with the Chinese language and culture.

I did miss a bit explanations on the gramatical structure of chinese sentences. I.e. position of verbs, times, places, pronouns in the sentences. I kind of figured them out, being them different to the structure of western languages. Google Translate helped often to understand this structure and words.

The teacher is JUST lovely. Many thanks for a lovely work!

This course is good. I've learned some Chinese when I was in middle school but I almost totally forgot. So I took this course to review some Chinese. This course is well arranged. They gradually add more vocabulary and patterns of the sentence each lesson. They also review some of them in the following lessons. However, there was a little mistake that I found such as in the last review. They forgot to type pinyin for some sentences. It would be very nice if it is improved. Thank you :)

Actually my review point is 4.5 but since there is no option like that, i will give it 4. Overall, course was good but i didn't like the very last part of the last week. It was like as if they did their best to give us important informations in the last seconds of the class. There is one thing i need to mention, course was good but i would want them to teach me how to use modal verbs in chinese. Because we learned a sentence with (can = neng in chinese) at the end of the course.

It's nice course. Teacher Liu pronounce very easy to listening. Her English is very easy to listen too. (My native language isn't English) But I think this course is too hard for one who doesn't know any thing in Chinese language. In my opinion you have to had some basic knowledge in Chinese language before you can take this course untroubled. (example you'd learn some pinyin speaking before when you study in your school course)

I enjoyed the experience. In teh frist week I really felt that I was elarning some basics, then I get lost. There has been a step that I certianly missed. The written exercise were starting to be too complex, mixing elements learnt in previous courses !

Now, It gave me some elements of how chinese is structured, but I would have like more of those basics explained.

Now the teacher is super friendly and videos are great.

Good as a standard introduction to chinese. We learnt similar words in our first-semester course at uni.

I'd personally also like to learn the simplified chinese symbols but that's just my opinion.

Weekly deadlines are good but if we keep going I won't revise anything. I'd rather have the course force me to repeat some of the words and constructs I have learnt in former courses. The assignments should be harder too.

A good course for newbies to Chinese, I enjoyed the simplicity of it. I actually took this course with my 8 year son who said he wanted to learn Chinese, he caught on way faster than I did. I had trouble in some of the tests I found the audio to be muffled and it made it hard to decipher what was being said. I got some questions wrong due to that. But overall I enjoyed it and would recommend it to others.

After many technical issues I decided to try the course using my phone.... and it worked! I enjoyed the rest of the course immensely! :-) I have given this course four stars instead of five as I feel there should have been a few more interactive quizzes to really imbed the target language. I actually used what I learned to chat to some Chinese people in my area! What a wonderful feeling. :-)

Good introductory course, I took this course after having graduated HSK3 so I found it really easy to complete. Unfortunately there is no real (hanzi) writing or reading activities but the listening parts are still very useful to understand the tones. I'd suggest more of this with longer and richer videos and more difficult quizzes (some are trivial also for the very beginners).

I'd say this was a pretty good introduction to Chinese. The main thing this accomplished for me was practicing the tones, which are very challenging. The vocabulary covered was very limited, and the course didn't really stress grammar, so you shouldn't expect to be able to form your own sentences after taking this course. But I think this is at least a good starting point.

The course is good for beginners. The lessons are short and the teacher is easy to understand. I really need the characters as well as the pinyin. I had to spend time after the lessons to find the characters. Then I saw the sheet at the end of all the lessons that had characters listed for everything. I wish I had known that. It would have saved me some time.

Haven enrolled in this short online course in Chinese for Beginners has really helped me. Now a Masters student at BNU, it's easy for me to communicate on campus and even outside campus. It makes it easier for a native to give you help since you can say something in Chinese. I am amazingly thrilled with my ease of lifestyle in Beijing; thanks to COURSERA

Me ha gustado mucho el curso. He disfrutado y encontré muy útiles de todas las actividades, tanto los vídeos, como las lecturas y los cuestionarios. Sin embargo, me hubiera gustado aprender más específicamente cómo pronunciar algunos sonidos (como j, x, zh). A parte de eso el curso fue estupendo. Muchas gracias coursera y la amable profesora del curso.

The teacher does a good job at concisely guiding you through pronunciation and vocabulary. Its a good first step towards Chinese proficiency. I didn't like the lack of written notes for me to study vocabulary. I found out at the end (week 7), they provide a comprehensive vocab guide. It may have been nice to have the added incrementally with each week.

The context and the contents of the course are easy to follow. The instructor speaks slowly and clearly. However, even if we don't learn to read and write the Chinese characters since it may be a tad too difficult, I would appreciate it if the course also adds some Chinese characters with the words so the students could try to familiarize themselves.

Very nice course! It was very interesting for me to learn Mandarin as I was totally new to this language. We went through 7 weeks of lectures which don't take much time. Literally 10 min per day is enough. Now i know a lot but unfortunately still can't really talk. I'm looking forward for another course, because these 7 weeks were not enough for me)

Ni Hao,

I liked the course, good course content though the first week which includes the tones was tough as it is hard to memorize the same. But as English phrase says, "try try till you succeed"or keeping trying till you succeed.So we have to keep trying the tones till we succeed.

Would like to thank the Professor for the video lectures.

XieXie

This was a nice, low-pressure course to introduce you to Chinese. The instructor had a very calm disposition, and did a good job making the course approachable (xie xie, laoshi). I wish there were optional hanzi (Chinese written characters) throughout the course, not just at the very end. Also a little variety in quiz style would be nice.

Professor Liu did a great job! I think dialogue is introduced too quickly and it would be nice that she explains at the beginning of the course the trick to learning and understanding beginners Mandarin is associating action word/verb with general fuctions "Tian" is used to describe time. Otherwise, its a great course, I liked it a lot!

This is a great intro course to Chinese! I would like to see the characters were written above the words as you learn to simply become familiar with some of the common characters. I am grateful for the access this course provides for those traveling to China to respectfully communicate and show interested in the Chinese culture.

I completed a free app on my phone, ChineseSkill, which was just the best thing I've ever done. Could do this course with my eyes closed and did all 7 weeks in about 3 days (total of 5 hours I think). Now I'm going back to that app cause it just amazes me how much more content they have. I recommend that app to everyone here!

Es el primer curso que acabo y me ha gustado mucho. Su inglés es entendible, los temas son lo básico y necesario para iniciar el idioma. Lo único desfavorable es la pronunciación por parte del alumnado ya que no se puede estar seguro de si se está pronunciando bien las palabras o no. Por todo lo demás un curso excelente.

Overall this course is really helpful when it comes to grammar and sentence structuring. You get experience with a lot of vocabulary as well. I gave the course four stars because Chinese characters aren't taught or covered at all, just pinyin. Which is fine, but it would be nice to have those briefly introduced as well.