Very hard course, especially with no background. They assume by demonstrating the words, that you know the meaning but no where do they confirm the meaning so you could be misinterpreting the words. Second is they do no teach characters but other than the first 60 seconds when the characters are shown, you are miraculously suppose to recognize the characters. The quizes include choosing tones but they don't really teach or review the tones. I've take Mandarin before and know some characters. I found this course to be too hard. Do not recommend for complete beginners. Better suited for someone who has learn Chinese and stopped for a while and want to review it again. If you are complete beginner, you will be lost and frustrated, though not because you can't learn but because this course is badly designed for beginners. I will acknowledge that the teachers and students speak very clearly and so that helps.

I am a complete beginner and even the first few videos feel very difficult. There are no translations of the meaning of the symbols and one has to infer their meaning from the videos which is often not easy. The in-video quizzes do not work for me.

its not suitable to a beginner.

Please unenroll me. thank you

I want unenroll

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.

This course is an example of learning by comprehensible input. I think using only Chinese for the whole course makes it easier for me to grasp the Chinese sentence structure. Even though I still struggle to make long sentences, I am familiar with how most characters are pronounced now. I believe when learning a second language, it's good to start with listening from comprehensible input, and then start speaking bit by bit. Reading and writing can come a bit later. Of course, this doesn't work if you're taking a course at your university or institution. So this online course is perfect for me who wants to take things easy and progress slowly, one word at a time.

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.

Blends the material into fairly natural conversation well, giving context to the learning material so that it's more useful. By not just having vocabulary words in the videos, you get some listening comprehension practice for free. The video material is a bit 'quaint' and simple because the course is somewhat old by this point, but I think that added to my enjoyment on net. So good course: good for me as a lower intermediate learner to review material and learn some new things, and probably also good for a beginner to get (Taiwanese) Mandarin in context from the start.

I loved both the syllabus and the teacher! They taught really useful Chinese words for beginners. Just a heads up, they use Traditional Chinese characters in this class. If you’re thinking about working in mainland China someday, you might want to learn Simplified Chinese instead. But Traditional Chinese is used in places like Taiwan and Hong Kong. Overall, I would definitely continue studying with the following courses of National Taiwan University, thank you so much for the hard work put into this beautiful course

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!)

I like the way the teacher teaches mostly, there might be some rooms for improvement hopefully including vocabularies explanation in English.

I want to recap this course later in my spare time if possible. Really likeable.

Thanks for offering this free and meaningful course for me.

The best course for students with no Chinese background. The terms and words teached are the ones used in Taiwan, which makes this course ideal to take when it comes to travel to Taiwan and to be able to handle daily situations without fear.

The course provides a basic foundation with simple vocabulary and topics for anyone interested in learning Mandarin. I love the creative scenarios they use to help you understand how the words/phrases are used in specific contexts.

Very good information. I thought the course was very informational and gave me help to know how I best need to continue learning Chinese. I need more practice and probably a work book to support my learning. Thank you.

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.

Quand on a commencé avec le Mandarin, la difficulté vient des caractères qui ne sont pas simplifiés. Toutefois on s'en sort très bien avec Wiktionary. C'est seulement un peu plus difficile à mémoriser.

A very good course! However, if you're a complete beginner starting from zero then this course is not for you. In my opinion it's more suitable if you've completed HSK 1 and working towards HSK 2.

Pretty thorough course for beginner learners, with adequate amount of difficulty, although this course is not enough for learning Chinese, I think this is like a teaser for Traditional Chinese.

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!

Highly recommend this course for the beginners as there are video dialogues with the situations discussed which is easy to understand and define what are they talking about.