Really good curriculum held back by certain business decisions
First I would like to say that the curriculum itself is extremely well done. Phil and Luke clearly know their stuff with respect to language pedagogy. I have tried a number of language learning resources and have usually had concerns that I was either being extremely inefficient with highly guided material or having to cut my own path to be efficient. It is a great relief simply to have a program to follow and not deal with the additional cognitive friction of uncertainty and curriculum building. You just press play and follow the instructions and you will be using a highly efficient and fairly enjoyable system. Learning a foreign language as an adult is difficult and no system can make that not the case, but this one takes as much friction as possible out of the process. However, the very well-done curriculum suffers from a couple of decisions. First and most salient to my experience is the use of the Traverse application as an SRS system. It is in virtually every sense inferior to the leader in the SRS space, Anki. I have used Anki for years and the stability, ecosystem, feature set, and user experience is top-notch. Much of this derives from the fact that Anki is an open-source application and the entire community is focused on making it a good tool to support learning. Traverse seems to have been built specifically to lock materials into the application and prevent modification. Even more obnoxious is the fact that MB used to use Anki for everything and the videos mention this frequently, so I'm constantly reminded that the system used to use a richer, more stable, and more open software solution. And the founders try to sell Traverse as a solution on the basis that it is more intuitive for users and that this was a user-centric position. I find that enormously implausible. It's probably way easier to keep people from sharing MB flashcards with friends because openness is part of Anki's DNA and closedness is part of Traverse's, but it's annoying and insulting to be told multiple times that not only was the superior option standard for a while, but that switching to the worse one was a pro-user decision. In my seven years of using Anki I have not experienced the number of bugs and poor UX that I have in three months of using Traverse. I get it, guys. You got mouths to feed. But don't expect me to thank you for switching to a significantly worse system as an absolutely essential aspect of your program rather than use the rich, stable, optimized, and open alternative you used to use. Another thing that is less of an issue but still a bit annoying: the level of self-promotion in the program is a bit excessive. Don't get me wrong: the curriculum is really very good. And maybe all the self-promotion works for them. It seems like a lot of effort and presumably they wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't working. But I was intensely skeptical before I decided to try it because my first instinct with things containing that much self-promotion is that the product can't stand on its own. It really is a good product beyond the annoyance of the Traverse decision. To summarize: this is a very good Mandarin curriculum from two guys who work hard and know what they are doing pedagogically. It is held back by locking users into an SRS system (which is key to the curriculum) that is inferior in every way to the previous one. It also causes a few eye-rolls on the self-promotional aspect of the product. I haven't met Phil and Luke, but they seem like solid dudes. I'm sure these are very reasonable business decisions and they probably legitimately believe they are doing right by everybody on the decisions. But I would be lying if I said I didn't think they are undermining some percentage of the really fantastic work they have done with these decisions.