A high-quality, comprehensive, and fun course
I chose Mandarin Blueprint (MB) because I wanted a comprehensive course that would take me from knowing absolutely nothing about Chinese to being able to read, write, and speak well. I've now been using the MB courses for an hour a day for seven months, and I'm impressed with my progress. I just finished the Foundation course (lessons 1 - 36), and I know 600 characters and about 1,000 words made up of those characters without relying on pinyin. That includes knowing how to recognize the characters, how to write them from memory, and their pronunciation (including initials, finals, and tones). I've also completed MB's Pronunciation Mastery course and the Speaking and Listening Kickstarter. I can read easy materials like the example sentences included in the MB course, as well as graded readers from other companies. While I can read aloud quite well, my listening and extemporaneous speaking skills are lagging behind, so I'll need to find some outside resources to practice having spontaneous conversations. But even so, MB has been more than worth the money for the wealth of resources they provide and the smart learning methods they teach. MB has taken me from zero to the point where I can genuinely begin to use the language, and I can see the path the rest of the way up the mountain to fluency. MB includes enough further material (going up to 3,050 characters, way past HSK 6, and many thousands of additional sentences) that I could keep studying at my current pace for another two and a half years before running out. And because MB's learning methods are fun, even after seven months of daily study, I'm not burned out and am excited to keep climbing this mountain. I strongly recommend Mandarin Blueprint and can say that it has been well worth the cost for me.