Disappointing. I am disappointed because many parts of the class I like and are helpful to my learning. For over one month, the course has been stalled at the grading of my speaking skills stage. To be clear, the problem is no grade has been provided. The quizzes which test listening and reading skills are computer graded and immediate feedback is provided. The speaking skills assessment is "peer graded". Personally, I am uncomfortable with grading other student's speaking abilities, but I have "peer graded" other students. Not providing timely feedback on the speaking skills is unacceptable. Learning theory is based on timely and valid feedback, but this course is not able to provide timely and valid feedback.

I have several issues with this course. Although I did learn and enhance my Mandarin a little bit, I wish I was involved in a different course because this one was not efficient.

1) Dialog videos sometimes has music where the audio level is much higher than the mandarin speaking. This is a language course and I cannot learn if I can't hear the speaking. (particularly in L8P2: Mark's Diary)

2) Presenter's English pronunciation and grammar is so bad that I have to replay portions to understand her explanations (no offense, I know it's not her native language) . It would be better if there was no English at all in this course, or a presenter who can speak English more clearly. I don't have a lot of time to spend and it takes away efficiency of learning.

3) Some of the "repeat aloud" sections of the videos have missing sentences from what was played in the initial dialogue. The editor missed things in many of the videos.

Overall, I am not happy with this course. I will be trying one from a different university.

PART 2 : We continue with interesting and well focused lessons ; clear explanations and references. All very good

Nice materials and interesting course. Thanks to Coursera for the financial aids

Enjoyable lessons. It appears to be higher than HSK Level 3.

amazing course. i learned a lot.

Excellent, thank you.

very very helpful

great course

The structure is good and helps students finish the course. I would suggest, however, using native speakers for all Mandarin Chinese spoken content.

I really wanted to like this course, but found some issues:

1) Audio Quality in dialog is poor. Audio seems to clamp, audio volume between the two speakers is not the same level (hard to find a good adjustment), Too much background music and noise that makes it harder to understand the speakers.

2) in most dialogues one of the speakers is a western (not native Chinese). I really don't understand this. One of the main reasons that drives me to take a class from a Chinese University is to listen to native Chinese speakers.

3) Although the western speaks Chinese well, he doesn't fully pronounce the words.

4) The speed of the dialogues is way too fast.

5) The grammar explanations are very limited. Often when taking the quizzes, I would run into a situation that was not explicitly covered by the explanations.

6) The peer feedback is not at all useful. This should be waived.

I hope they fix some of these issues so I can take the next level class in the future.

Not as good as I expected after Part 1 of this same course. I'll focus on the problems i've found:

Video content: quality varies week to week, but some videos are barely understandable with too noisy music or too fast talking for an HSK3 student.

Grammar: indeed HSK3 level, but sometimes poorly explained.

Vocabulary: about half of vocabulary is HSK4 or higher, this is confusing since HSK4+ contains a lot of HSK3 synonyms that would require a deeper explanation.

Quizzes and evaluations: quizzes are repetitive and not randomized, the questions are always the same in the same order. They can't really assess anything. The final peer evaluation is another thing I just can't understand. For a paid course we should get at least a native teacher evaluation. There are not so many students and teachers should have plenty of time to assess them.