I’m struggling with this Coursera HSK3 programme because the quality is really not good.

Frankly, after a lot of trying, I give up on this Coursera HSK3 programme.

I’ve done HSK 2, all 5 Pimsleur levels and spent time in 8 cities in China.

Quality is not great:

The Transcript is not always available

The explanations are not sufficient/ non existent to understand the grammar.

The English spoken is strange and regularly is not great English, e.g. at the end of each video introducing vocabulary she, says “Lets learn some words more”. This is not a well polished course worthy of being on Coursera.

The English used in translations are also sometimes strange or even don’t really make sense. For a course I’m paying for, I do expect that the creators of this course would at least get a natural English speaker to review and contribute. This course feels sloppy and it doesn’t appear that sufficient effort has been put into making it.

The ‘guest videos’ have sound sometimes at different level compared to the rest of the training videos. I miss the start of the speaking in the video as I’m trying to adjust the volume.

Even the presentation slide is not quite level/ straight on screen

I’ve done several other Coursera programmes in different knowledge domains and the standard of this course is the worst by far.

The presenters permanent fixed grin is strange and feels insincere and a bit disturbing. The style of tilting her head back means that she is talking down her nose to me as if I’m a little child who knows nothing. Her relatively static delivery is unengaging to the point of dullness. Her voice dynamics are limited which only further distances me.

The approach is very old-school, dull and not effective at putting the info into memory

Just “repeat after me” vocabulary with one or two limited examples of only a few of the total vocab list

The volume of material per week is enormous. For a part-time course, this is ridiculous. I’ve done several other Coursera programmes in different knowledge domains and none just throw masses of material at you like this. I know that I’m a particularly bad student, but it took me a month to do one week’s material.

The tests are useful, probably the most useful part.

Recommendations

Start by studying the Coursera “Learning how to Learn” course! Apply all these basic and well-known ideas, including spaced repetition, chunking, etc. Teaching does not equal learning: you as the teachers are responsible for making my learning successful.

Fix the basic mistakes: some translations are just wrong, ensure that the English you use is correct (at minimum, a natural English speaker needs to thoroughly review everything), e.g. “感冒的时候，你吃不吃感冒药？Gǎnmào de shíhou，nǐchībuchīɡǎnmào yào? Do you have taken cold medicine when you caught a cold?” from Discussion Prompt, Lesson 3

Make the HSK3 course much more interactive: keep the tests, add many other forms of interaction, especially ones that use new vocabulary in real sentences,

Introduce a way to assess student’s ability to pronounce words and phrases, like language learning Apps such as Babel

At the start of the course, provide an overview that shows how the total of HSK3 material will be covered, then refer to this each week to show what has been achieved. I am not very clear what sort of progress I am making on learning the HSK3 material, so am lost, confused and demotivated.

Put a focus on how to learn characters.

Characters are not required knowledge in HSK1 or HSK2, so are the key new dimension in HSK3. What are effective strategies for learning characters? Do I need to recognize them (so I can read and can type Pinyin to convert into hanzi) or take this further and be able to hand-write them?

How can you help me get good at taking the HSK exams? What guidance, what tips, what practice routines?

Use a presenter that is more dynamic and not scaring me with a permanent grin while looking down her nose at me. See how some of the good Coursera presenters use body language and voice.

You just give examples of Separable Words without explaining how it works or what the Chinese means! What is 跳跳舞?

I am relatively new Chinese learner. I have completed the HSK I and II courses. This is a really good course and takes it to the next level (for someone of my Chinese language experience). It is intense. There is a lot of new vocabulary, about to new words per lesson. That's 50 new words per week. Don't relax and rely on pinyin folks. There is a little surprise in week 7 we you do the exam. There is no English and no pinyin its all characters for the reading and the listening answers. It was extremely challenging for me. But wow! What a great experience. I highly recommend this course

The course begins with pin ying translations but soon removes all pin yin from the tests. Since we do NOT study Chinese characters - there is no way to translate without using Google Translate - that is against the rules of the course. I'm don't know who decided to remove the pin yin associated with the tests but the decision was bad.

I will unenroll from this course.

It is quite remarkable that this class got us through, with so much to learn, in a short 7 weeks. The hard part, for me, was to not be afraid of tackling material that felt way harder than HSK2. I noticed that, if I persevere, even if I felt the amount of content was a little over my head sometimes, with constant review and being well organized to never miss a deadline, it is doable.

My take-away here is that the class could easily stretch over a semester, with two lessons a week, so that we have time to assimilate the vocabulary, practice writing the text in 汉字, in Chinese characters, practice permutations in grammar exercises, and nurture long-term memorization.

It is normal to “feel behind,” I think, unless you already live in an environment with Chinese speakers all around you all the time. Above all, the teachers were superb, enunciating very clearly, making distinctions between tones, exceptions, giving us a few rules at a time. The vocabulary was very varied, sometimes embedded into very funny situations, which makes learning even easier.

So, for all of you future HSK learners, don’t bei ntimidated by the class. It is absolutely doable. It is well-taught, by first-rate teachers, and you never have to wonder whether the expressions you are being taught are actually correct Chinese. The class, in that respect is rock-solid. Forgive the few awkward English translations sometimes, Chinese and English do not always “meet” exaclty at the same point.

And it’s so rewarding to realize I can read far more in Mandaring Chinese than I used to just a few weeks ago. So, go for it!

Even Though I have a grounding in Chinese, but I found this course benefit me a lot. I have work very hard and managed to complete HSK 3 part I in short time and I will go for harder level.

The exams during the class were too simple, compared to the final exam. I think there should be more exams, and more challenging exams, on the weekly course.

Great course, the content is interesting.

The teachers are doing a great job at explaining the various grammar points.

I feel that my Chinese has improved quite a lot thanks to this course.

This course is best for students who already have a grounding in Chinese, and who want to review or extend their learning to study for the HSK 3 exam. Be sure to download and preview the "Dialogue and Vocabulary" .pdfs before watching the videos, and review the videos to reinforce the lessons. The teachers are very friendly and encouraging. Great resource!

I liked the level of this course, cause it was challenging it all senses. The most difficult part for me was the reading and writing one. Thanks very much for this awesome experience.

The Chinese HSK3 Part I is a very good course. I would take it again and I would recommend to others. I really enjoyed the teacher's lessons.

I will explain why I gave 4/5 stars:

1) DIALOGUE (Quality of audio). Similar to other Chinese courses here at Coursera, the audio quality of the dialogue is not the best. There is background and static audio noise. Raising the volume makes it even harder to listen. Some dialogues are better than others.

2) DIALOGUE (Speed). Some of the dialogues were not at all useful to me as the speed of the speakers was extremely fast. I visit China often and I can say that most people won;t speak as fast as some of these dialogues. Again, some dialogues were better than others.

3) Week 7 FINAL Test - It is insanely hard compared to the daily/weekly quizzes. I did well in the quizzes (most with 100% scores on first trial). By the time I got to the final, I thought I was going to do really well. Was I wrong! There are two reasons why I found the final to be so difficult. (i) the Listening Part is really really hard. I couldn't understand most of it in the first trial. Maybe something to do with the fact that I didn't get much out of the class dialogues (as described above). (ii) In order to do well in the final, you have to read Hanzi really well. I wish the class had Hanzi lectures and quizzes.

I enjoyed taking this course and i learned alot, practical vocabulary and grammar in particular. I would like to suggest to the teacher to provide additional reading material related to the topics learned so that the final reading test would be less intimidating, i found this part most difficult! ...In addition, I would also suggest alot more activities for students to upload and share their spoken Chinese mp3 with each other at the end of each unit... on a side note, i noticed many spelling mistakes in both pinyin and English, among some incorrect vocabulary pdf files too.

If you truly desire to prepare for HSK test, then I recommend this series of courses offered by University of Peking. I am embarrassed by how much time I spent using other learning processes and applications without a coherent skills development plan or assessment tools. Through the Chinese for HSK and Coursera teams I have been welcomed into a supportive learning community, that for me, is comfortable and engaging.

For many people learning Chinese is impossible not because of the difficulty of the language but because of accessibility. My city does not have enough schools to learn chinese, therefore Internet has been, for five years, my main resource. Thank you Beijing University, this course and its material are amazing.

Great! This lesson is very well structured and detailed. The teacher's pronunciation is also crystal clear that I am able to understand what she said without using subtitle anymore :) Thank you, I'm motivated to learn more and more!

This course is managed well by the staff of Peking university, it has a lot of examples and the teacher have good pronunciation so for you that want to learn HSK 3, this course is really recommended

Very clear explanation of grammar and new vocabulary. Good pace throughout. Exercises were helpful in making sure you understood the new concepts.

Thank you Peking University for making these--I've been looking for online classes! Any chance you will make an HSK 5 Series?

谢谢，

李恳

I learn so many things from this course.

Thank you very much Coursera and Peking University team for offering such an amazing course.

A great, free Chinese language course put together by teachers from one of the best universities in China.

instructive lecture. highly recommend