it was an amazing class. perfect class to take for who works full time. few additional notions every week. the teacher patiently repeats several time ervy sentence to help with pronunciation. Thanks

Recently I moved to Hong Kong, and learning Chinese language is always in my mind. I heard from many saying that Chinese is very tough language and difficult to learn. With that fear in my mind I joined this course, I want to give many thanks to Professor Xiaoyu Liu, very simple way she help me to get friendship with Chinese language. From the last one and half month I don’t realize when I am also using simple small words while interacting with my colleague in office here in Hong Kong or interacting with the people in restaurants.

This course been milestone for my learning mandarin language journey, still far to go but here I can say I started the journey. Once again, many thanks to professor Xiaoyu Liu who designed very simple, interactive course and help to connect the Chinese language.

Thank you Professor Xiaoyu Liu, Thank you Coursera.

This is fantastic effort from Peking University, for those who want to learn Chines. it just amazing. chines is very interesting language.....where we need to care of even sounds of a sentence......

Es excelente la profesora explica de maravillsa no tenia ni idea del chino y he visto mi progreso muy rapido

Best course for basic Chinese.

Thanks for this course. I like it and this language really so necessary for me and my job. My company in New Zealand - ESKA Ltd (www.eskaltd.co.nz, eskaltd.com) and we are work with aliens from China.

This course is excellent. It gives thorough introduction into language without going into too much unnecessary details. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to start learning Chinese from scratch.

Easy to understand. Short teachings, it's easy to remember. For the instructor: Thank you for your effort in creating the program.

I think it's a very useful and concise Chinese course. It will be very good for my trip to China.

Helpful course, now I know a bit of daily Chinese and I am planning to learn more about it.

Awesome Instructor and course. It was the best Chinese course for Beginners.

the videos are shorts which makes the course nice

A wonderful course for beginners.

Videos proceed way too fast for complete beginners and things are explained without enough underlying basics. Plus there is not really enough chance for repetitions in the videos. Tonal explanations are good, except for the green line where you are not told how to choose what part of that tone to pronounce every time. Overall, it could be a great course but falls short because the videos proceed way too fast and without enough repetitions or even practice exercises to be able to remember the phrases afterwards.

Terrible. Had to verify multiple times. Audio quiz had no sound (struck-thru speaker icon I couldn't fix.)

I'd be disappointed with Cousera for foisting this trash if I hadn't taken "Learning How to Learn," much less buggy.

Would disenroll if there was any way to do so.

Not a very interesting class, only learned some vocabulary and some pre made sentences, but no general structure or grammar. This means that it would be impossible for me to even guess how to form an other sentence with the words i know.

I didn't find this course to be too helpful.

Not a very good course layout

I don't like

I have certainly enjoyed this online course to get the basics of Chinese, and I do believe the way it was done has been a great compromise between time and information being shown (that is, the course is really fast to finish with, yet very important information is being given; and on the other hand, not many deep details on grammar are being given, yet various important stuff are definitely discussed). I would certainly recommend it to people who want to get a hint about how does the chinese language work.

The first lessons were extremely useful to learn the way chinese is written and accentuated, the numbers, the colours, the time...All that very simple information which actually makes us feel we start to understand the language itself. However, I must admit that the last lessons (the application of basic language to various daily contexts) were certainly difficult. It was still easy to associate concepts and remember them for some time, but the variety of words is so complex that, I admit it myself, after a few hours it is fairly difficult to remember everything you just did. Some mnemotechnic rules will anyway help a lot to learn some expressions, and I am sure I will never forget those.

Overall, I am really happy to have spent some weeks finishing this course to understand the basics of chinese and never say I do not understand the language at all. I thank Professor Xiaoyu Liu for the time to prepare it, and wish her all the best of successes on getting more people to study her courses. Thank you.

I was amazed even during the first week of learning here. Teacher Xiaoyu Liu was excellent (I wish I could also give 5 stars to the teacher and the university as well, which would be 15 stars in total)!

I would practice using an app that allowed voice recognition. Every time I repeated after Teacher Xiaoyu Liu and used the app, I nailed it. Then, I realized I had to keep repeating after her over and over again. I previously tried other places like using apps to learn, but nothing compared to what I found here. This course just wakes up my appetite to really get to learn and speak Mandarin like a native. The challenge just got started because I want Mandarin Chinese to soon be added as the 5th to the list of languages I can speak, and I want to speak fluently.

Thank you Pinking University, Coursera, Teacher Xiaoyu Liu and everyone who made this possible!

Duō xiè nǐ men (多谢你们)!

Course is a little disorganized, and sounds are a little difficult to hear sometimes (in the exercises where you're asked to distinguished sounds, but I guess that's the point of those exercises. I don't quite understand the self-study videos because they're already in the main lesson videos, but otherwise, this is a wonderful course. I mean, I already speak a tonal language so the tones are easy for me, but they shouldn't be too difficult for non-tonal speakers too. Otherwise, this course gets you through the basics pretty quickly without too much emphasis on vocabulary or grammar and without Chinese characters; if you're keen, you'll pick up the grammar as you go along.

On a more technical note, the videos could be of better resolution, but that's not going to impede the course progression or anything. Kudos to this course's contributors!

If you want to learn some Mandarin and you are not sure where to start...just start here with this Course. It is all verbal and conversational. You do not have to learn Chinese characters and if you have been thinking, "No, Chinese is too hard to pronounce, its a "tonal ;language", blah blah whine whine "...please believe me, Professor Liu Xiaoyu is going to turn that entire generalization on its head and kick it out of the room. She speaks slow and patiently and if you can pronounce the words "seesaw, Jane Eyre, washer-dryer, car, how, why, and maybe" , then, you can pronounce Mandarin. Whats more...you will be understood. Its a seven week course at your own pace and it covers a lot of ground. You will not be disappointed and you will be amazed what you can learn from her. Try it.

Fine sensible teacher, excellent enunciation and pacing. I shall be returning to this course every few months to keep improving my pronunciation bit by bit.

It is impossible to recommend this course too highly for beginners -- and I say this as an expert on introductory languages. I have been English-French bilingual as a child, and Japanese-English as an adult. In addition I have learned six or eight languages at the tourist level, and can do "Hello, I'm here from the gas company, to read yur meter..." plus thank you, which way? Where's the light switch? and so forth in 24. (I live in Toronto, so there are lots of languages around...)

This means I've seen both good and bad language courses.

This course is one of the good ones.

I really enjoyed this. Its main strong point is that the pronunciation is very clearly modelled, for students to copy. It covers quite a lot of ground. There are a lot of words in it, but many of them are recycled in later lectures, which helps them to stick. There isn't any grammar explanation, so if you like studying languages more analytically, this might not be the course for you, although as I said, I'd still recommend it if you are new to Chinese pronunciation. The only thing I wasn't particularly impressed by were the quizes, which were a bit easy, but I suppose they want the course to be accessible to as many people as possible, and not to put people off for fear of failing. Thanks for making this course available.