Pros and Cons
Some pros and cons here with this program. Lets start with the pros (ultimately a yes when given a choice of platforms/choices to choose from): 1. There is plenty of comprehensible input to learn from! No shortage there! This is great because you don't have to go elsewhere to obtain reading/listening skills. 2. The Hanzi Movie Method used to retain Hanzi characters works! Great way to learn (not just memorize) Hanzi characters! 3. Extensive vocabulary to be learned! 4. Learn at your own pace with no pressure to move fast. The course is set up to move at your convenience so you can learn as fast or slow as desired. 5. The co-creators, Luke and Phil, have great personalities and do a fantastic job conveying messages when explaining how characters are used amongst other things. Great communication skills! 6. I am now a Chinese speaking American! I can't get enough of that feeling and because of that I will continue to pursue the course. Now for the cons (not a reason to turn away, just some flaws I've noticed): 1. The Chinese culture of humility and being humble is constantly preached throughout the course but the creators, 2 white males (one being from the UK- the OG white male) charge in-house 4 year university tuition rates if seeking a tutor for help. Community college tuition rates solely for the online courses. The reason being is that fluency is promised 3x faster along with a method of teaching that "doesn't exist in other schools" (not having been to every Chinese teaching school, so can't confirm for every school in the world). A bit pricy when viewed from this perspective. All surrounded by a teaching method. The amount and type of content can be replicated in any other online course. 2. The sequence of teaching is a bit contradicting. Acquiring the language via speaking/listening (immersion) is emphasized yet you start out by learning the equivalent to the alphabet in Hanzi. It was acknowledged that children learn to speak and comprehend by listening before going to school, yet here we are learning parts of Hanzi characters and full characters that are never used alone as words. I get that this helps with translation if struggling to remember. ALSO: quite a few common words (喜欢 & 告诉 to name a couple) are not taught together as 1 word! Why learn literally 1 half of a word in 1 lesson and the other half a few lesson later with the full word? 3. The Traverse App, in my experience (and I can't stress that enough), has too many glitches and/or coding/errors to rely on completely. Anytime I've contacted the owner/support the only thing that happened was my problem being acknowledged, never fixed. Sometimes the pictures show up, sometimes they don't. For some reason the font changes ever so often making it difficult to read the characters when you're used to the basic font (problem for beginners getting familiar). 4. There are some Vault sentence flashcards that have implied words in the English translation but don't show up in the Mandarin portion. Example: "wo keneng yao wan dian zou." which translates (according to the card) to "I might be a little late today." The word for today is "jintian" but not in the Chinese part! While normally implied and understood in a conversation, as a beginner you're paying attention to every word trying to translate it. It is confusing when you're given the English to translate only to find you were "missing" a word. Quite a few cards are like this forcing an extra step of memorization if you want to get the translation correct. Many other small typos in the translations with these cards. Nothing prohibiting you from learning. 5. Lots of motivational speeches and pressure from the creators to stick with the program. I suppose I'm just not part of that target market since I'm extremely self-motivated to begin with. I had to unsubscribe from the emails since that's all they were. Felt a mild tone of a guilt trip if not reviewing every day. Its fine to take a day or 2 off, just don't make it a habit. In conclusion, paying for the online course if worth it. You can use LanguaTalk for an AI assistant for speaking/typing practice. Its made specifically for language learning. Then, you can take what you've learned to iTalki or a local Chinese restaurant and they'll tell you you're correct "more or less" (personal preference), but never wrong. An outside source to perform a quality check would be beneficial. I see room for improvement while acknowledging I have come leaps and bounds from self-studying. The downloadable stories help a lot!