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.