This is a great course to prepare for the HSK 1. I really think I could not have completed the course successfully without having prior knowledge of Chinese though. While there are no prerequisites for the course, I recommend that a person have some background with the language; otherwise you will be overwhelmed by the third week and perhaps lose interest. There are a number of free resources on the internet, and particularly You Tube videos, to become familiar with the language.

This course has a great structure with a combination of learning speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills. I feel that this course adequately prepares you for the HSK Level 1 test. My recommendation for this course would be to provide a list of all of the vocabulary words needed for the HSK exam on 1 document. It would be nice to get some sort of study guide to review the materials. I will continue to study Chinese and this course has given me a great foundation. Thank you!

This course is excellent! I can only recommend it tenfold! It gives you all the information you need for hsk 1 level. The flexiblilty was a very encouraging factor. The course is excellently planned, with great teachers and advice. I found it really helpful and I am now more encouraged than ever to continue studying Chinese! I am thankful for the opportunity learn Chinese and to have access to material I otherwise would not have access to, available at any time.

Thank you Coursera!

Firstly, this is more advanced in nature as it is tailored towards attaining HSK 1. Second, the teaching method is great and easier to understand. The role-play is not awkward and they used native actors, not a foreigner. The test is moderately hard and involved a lot of listening questions. The final week test, I think is the hardest among all. I'm surprised by the amount of question they put. Thank you Coursera and Peking University for designing such a great course.

This course gives you a feeling that you are having a real ONSITE course. Very simple and useful method, it is worth to start, one by one all courses, and to achieve the HSK 6 level without any stresses. You will get a lot of joy, friends all over the world while joining to the communicating forums together with teachers and developers.

At the same time, you will be able to speak, read and write in Chinese, and will have very good knowledge in gramma. This is for sure!

Excellent course! Very good instructor! Video lectures are 5-10min each, which I think is the perfect length!

The course is well-structured, and materials are a mix of listening and reading, with a variety of good-sized everyday life dialogues. I personally don't find the writing section very helpful but I seek a separate book for that purpose.

Overall, an excellent course and I highly recommend for all beginners! It makes learning Chinese particularly interesting!

Such a useful course and I really appreciated their use of different materials to help us learn the material. The teacher is very clear in her pronunciation and her examples. I also appreciate they differentiate between what is necessary material for the HSK L1 test and what is "extra" learning. This course, along with my tutor I speak with on Skype, I feel my confidence in Chinese has doubled already since January! Can't wait to begin Level 2!

Decent self-paced course for a challenging language. To a fair degree, you choose the level of difficulty yourself. At the base level, it teaches and tests listening skills and one can choose to pursue using the phonetic pinyin form only. You can extend it to reading the ideograms themselves or even to write them. It may be difficult to stay on their schedule if you did so since there are 150 or so characters to be mastered.

Compared to many other online courses outside of Coursera, this online course is the most efficient so far. A very high quality course for Chinese learners from the oldest university in China. Ms Yu Bin´s Chinese classes provides a very high level of learning experience for disciplined learners. After completing the HSK 1 course, it seems to be impossible to fail the HSK1 test.

Thank you very much to the 北京 大学 汉语水平考试 Team！

I have tried many online courses to learn chinese language but this is surely one of the best courses that I ever have attended. The phrases are easier to remember as they are used in daily conversation. The lectures explain the basic structure of building a sentence and the videos give an impression how to use it. The conversations in the video also help alot to get used to chinese pronounciation. Thank you very much!

You get to learn about basic words and sentences so that when your done with the course you'll be able to have simple conversations with others. This course also teaches you the Chinese characters and how to write them in the correct stroke order too. As a bonus, you even get a small amount of Chinese culture information sprinkled in throughout the course as well. This is a great way to start your learning for Chinese.

I really liked the course. All the lessons were so easy to understand and I can't explain how good it was with a few words. Every dialogue was needed and enough, every material was efficient. I also really liked how the final exam is similar to HSK exams so we can get some idea about it too. It was beneficial and I will definitely continue to learn through this HSK Chinese series for sure. Thanks for the good work!

Has many USEFUL short conversation videos, EXPLAINS every single character used in those and the audios really help to improve LISTENING. The course make it easy for us to remember because REVIEWS those dialogues and give us the chance (optional) to write characters. I learned by repetition: video of dialogue, explanation of it, audio of the dialogue broken into small sentences, write some characters.

This course was really nice and easy to follow. The explanations were clear, and the content propely structured. I really liked the fact that a lot of listening output was offered, without missing essential parts such as writing hanzi properly. The fact that not only are preparing you for HSK1 but to learn Chinese in itself was really appreciated. I will definitely follow up with the Chinese for HSK2.

Really an exciting and interesting course! I could move my first steps in a very tough world, teacher Yu Bin can take your hand and lead you to the end of the journey with competence and lightness. At the end of this course I am able to deal with simple situations, to recognize and to write dozens of Chinese characters and to know hundreds of Chinese words. Thank you for everything, 谢谢 Francesco

Thank you so much for the opportunity to fill in some of my gaps! I have lived in China now for over 7 years but have always struggled with my listening and speaking skills [as well as not knowing many of the characters around me]. You have already gone a long way towards plugging up those pesky holes and helping me grow some confidence again in trying to learn Chinese :) God bless to you all!

I loved the course. I had started learning Chinese a year ago but had stopped studying for a while. This course helped me to get back on track and it helped me to remember many words and grammar structures I had forgotten about. I loved the dialogues, exercises, and quizzes. Thank you very much for this great course. I plan to take the next course and continue learning Chinese.

This course was a great introduction to Chinese, and also provided optimal exercises similar enough to the actual HSK test. The content for each lesson is appropriately divided by categories, making it easier to find what you're looking for when you don't remember something well. Having an HSK mock exam as the final test will also prove very useful when taking the real version.

I tried to study Chinese when I was 10 years old and I gave up since then.

This course have changed my mind!! I gain a lot of basic knowledge that we need to know in this course including how to read pinyin, plenty of vocabularies, grammars and conversations.

Thanks to Ms.YU Bin and teams. I definitely will continue the other courses. It really help me in my career!

It has been an amazing experience for me. I started with the Chinese for Beginners course, and now I completed the HSK 1 Course. I want to thank Peking University for the quality of these courses, my only suggestion would be to improve some of the dialogues because some of them have to much echo and this makes harder the process of understanding the conversation.

I am very thankful to Pekin University for the resources in this course. Aside from this course, I bought a second-hand book to practice for HSK and now I have my certificate. For a long time, I really wanted to start learning Chinese but is very expensive where I live and I couldn't afford it. Great course, and resources to make learning Chinese fun and easy! :)

The content is explained clearly and progresses at a good pace. I already had one semester of college Mandarin and a year of self study before taking this course, but I wanted a refresher. Even though I'm not quite a beginner, I still gained some new insight on using Mandarin in practical settings. Overall, I would highly recommend this course for beginners.

A great course for starting to learn Chinese with the additional goal of learning to pass the important HSK level 1 proficiency test. Instructor is YU Bin is one of most dedicated college professor I have ever meet in my years taking courses at university or Coursera! It really shows in her teaching style and the constant feedback that she provides.

This course is very useful for beginners who want to learn basic Chinese and would like to test HSK1. The instructor will teach you about basic Chinese words, grammar, and culture. So, you will get a lot of knowledge which is necessary for the examination. Moreover, you can use it for communication in daily life with Chinese friends, too. :)

I love this course. It covers a lot of new words and grammar and brings me a firm foundation in learning Chinese. The content is really good and easy to follow and the practices provide a lot of ways of blending what one has learned. In my opinion, if there were more videos, dialogues, and reading passages, it would be way more practical.