This course was actually quite helpful for learning Chinese, and it provides fascinating information about Chinese culture. Besides learning the language, you'll learn about holidays, foods, and art, and you'll hear Chinese music.

Unfortunately, I could not give the course a good rating because I found some quiz questions impossible to complete. This questions required answers to be typed in Pinyin or in Chinese characters. However, the course gave no information on how to type the Pinyin tone marks or Chinese characters into the response boxes. I tried asking about this in a discussion forum, but got no answer.

The testing in this course is horribly crafted. Not is it only too easy, thus not actually testing students what is learned, the answers for some of the questions are incorrect. On the very last quiz, I was not able to finish the course because the answer for one of the questions was incorrect. In answering how to translate "South," the answer should be "nánbian," but when I selected this option, it was marked wrong. Therefore, I have to wait 7 more hours before selecting an incorrect answer to complete the course.

While the efforts of the coursemakers are greatly appreciated, much could be done to refine the quality of the course. Many materials have broken links and the lack of character entry for some practice problems poses an issue as pinyin with tones is rather hard to type.

Despite being someone with spoken Mandarin ability, I have decided to stop taking this course due to the new vocabulary not being explicitly described or explained in much detail. The basic grammar is also skipped over in explanation.

The lessons cover practical topics and are easy to understand. It will be great if Chinese characters are also introduced in the lessons along with pinyin.

The dialogue and information (especially about culture) is very useful. However, I feel characters are very important to the Chinese language. Without the inclusion of the characters, I feel the course is not as good as it could be.

I liked the emphasis on the spoken language and the bullets on China and its culture. I wish we had also the Chinese characters as in the first course; there were problems with the computer assessment of some of the quizzes.

The teacher is very nice.

I rated it with 3 stars only because this course does not contain any information about chinese hieroglyphs. In my opinion it is the main part of the language, and should be included.

It consists of only conversations and little explanation. The videos are fun and exciting but not much of explanations. The additional information were very informative and good.

Ok for people brushing up on existing knowledge but not for beginners with no other sources of help

I can't believe this represents Peking University. If I were Chinese, I would mortified this was produced to represent my country and culture to people learning the language. The dialogue is superficial as a beginnig language course would be expected to be, but this is disgusting. The female character whiles like spoiled child throughout each video. I'm not certain my ears aren't bleeding. One video portrays the female character whining that she must buy more clothes while the male character tells her no. What party leader approved such misogynistic drivel to be disseminated to represent China? And from what is purported to be China's premier institute of higher learning? Seriously?

As an academic, it's embarassing that this represents teaching. Often the quizzes have only slight relationships to the learned material as though the content creator had zero education experience.

The English dialogue has many mistakes typical of a below average English language learner. I feel embarrassedfor the host. I don't know whether she's too arrogant to have asked colleagues who speak English well to proofread the script or that no one around her would tell th truth for feear of making her lose face. Whichever is the circumstance, now it's online and downloadable for the world to see, and China herself loses face.

Major issues with the tests not accepting Chinese or pinyin text which they failed to respond to, despite multiple complaints.

no able to move forward as some exercises have other results

Before writing this review, I managed to read some of the negative reviews this course had got. It goes without saying that this course has certain weaknesses, nobody would argue about that. I agree that some tasks are impossible to be done because of the probable input problems. For instance, you type the correct sentence in characters, and it says it is wrong. I am sure the developers have a lot to work on. The English in the course should be proofread. Nevertheless, there are a lot of advantages. The vocabulary choice is perfect for the beginners to learn the basics. The grammar introduced is also quite enough to make simple sentences. There is a lot of cultural information that will help those who are planning to visit the country. The Instructor's personality is really nice and her devotion is obvious. And so on and so forth...

I enjoyed taking the course. Being a false beginner, I learned something new.

P.S. About the personalities of the characters in the videos - guys, here, in Europe, we cannot accept the American way at all. Just keep it in mind, and never forget about cultural differences.

I was astonished how well this course works on-line! I was not expecting so much. The course is very well structured and you REALLY LEARN. If I could add some things, these would be: 1) writing the answers in pinyin should be made a bit less strict, avoiding the need for accents specially, and 2) would be great some way to check "our pronunciation" and the tasks (homework) that we submit. Apart from the automatic correction of tests made easy because of options, when free writing it needs to send some feed back. But again, GREAT Job to Mrs Liu, our tutor from the University of Peking. What a pleasure!

In my opinion, the quizzes for the first until third week is more challenging than the quizzes from fourth to final (sixth) week, so I think the first three weeks quizzes is more helpful than the last three weeks. I also have learned a lot of new vocabularies, I hope I will get to use them someday in practice. Overall, this course is recommended to get starting to learn Chinese language, will be better if there is another Chinese language course from this university using the Hanzi instead of PInyin.

Respected Laoshi, First of all i am very thank ful to you and the whole Coursera team who is doing great job. I find this course a very helpful . The things i learned in this course is greetings with someone and the basic daily life communication. I suggest this course should be taken by all beginners. Looking forward for more courses like this.

Thank you once again. ( Wo hen kai xin xuexi hanyu gen nin)

This is an excellent introduction to Chinese language and grammar. I think it could have some introduction to written Chinese because Pinyin is not so common. I struggled with some of the quizzes where written answers were given, even when my answers were correct some quizzes required stops (.) others didn't. Apart from that it was excellent.

The teacher is so energy and teach so awesome. She's also gorgeous, as you know. The content and videos are so good, high quality. I think all of you spend a lot of time to make these useful videos. Thank in advance! I hope you will have more and more perfect Chinese classes in the future.

This course was amazing, I learned a lot about the culture and the language. So I hope a day having the opportunity to go to China, meanly in Beijing and I''ll enjoy learn more and to have the pleasure in having a conversation with Professor Xiaoyu Liu.

Would be even better if hanzi is included through conversations and lessons. It helps more to remember the meaning of words. Also the quizzes should be longer and more difficult to practice more the vocab and grammar. Overall, great course! very useful.

I love how there are detailed explanations on the Chinese grammar.

I find it really helpful because even though I've already learnt most of the basics but I'm still struggling with Chinese grammar.

Thank you. I really enjoy learning with this course.

Curso bem legal, bom continuação pra quem já fez o Chinese for Beginners, ajudou a aprender um pouco mais de gramática, vocabulário, expressões básicas usadas em situações comuns, sempre de um jeito prático e leve.

I thoroughly enjoyed this course. I was my second course with the same instructor, Xiaoyu Liu. She has a very pleasant personality, obviously enjoys teaching, and she moves the course along at a very good pace.

I specially thank once again, the course instructor Associate Professor Xiaoyu Liu, the Peiking University and the Coursera Team for providing such a good course for free.

Xie xie nin! Xiaoyu Liu lao shi