I am very fond of your site and your online course. The podcasts are top notch and I listen to them every day. The website is also very well done. I will be a long-time user/listener and feel that Adam and Kirin are personal mentors of mine.

I like diversity of cultures and for me learning Chinese gives me a chance to explore China's culture. I plan to learn as much as I can over the next year as a basis for travelling to China some time in the future. The calligraphy is also something that draws me to the language. When you had said that you had started to pick it up 3 years ago then that gave me hope I can be fluent in Chinese, too. Keep up the great work!

By the way, I was born in the year of the pig and I intend to learn and advance my Mandarin this year with your help. Xiexie.

My wife and I have used several online Mandarin teaching sites. For us, Chinese Learn Online is the most comprehensive, user friendly and effective. The content, pacing, review, and reinforcement are superior, and we feel like we're in a class with an instructor who really cares about our success. We have enjoyed the podcasts and lessons so much that we'll continue when we return from China. That's about the best feedback you can get.

I am travelling to China in April and I absolutely love this course - I am up to lesson 50 and am learning so much so quickly, I have never had this much success learning a new language :)

WOW, so much to learn, and it goes so quickly! I've always wanted to learn Chinese and visit China, but I thought of it as a long term goal. Your podcast convinces me that I can do it sooner. Great structure and content! I look forward to each lesson and to using the premium membership to reinforce the podcasts. Thanks!

I love this site! I love this site! I can't believe I've never known about you guys. Great lessons; I found exactly what I was searching for in lesson four, and I think I might have found something I wasn't necessarily searching for: effective and easy-to-use lessons for learning Mandarin. I've tried audio CD's before, but your method of mixing the audio with Pinyin is perfect. That was the missing link. I couldn't see what the word was supposed to sound like, so I was always insecure about my pronounciation. But not anymore. I think I'm hooked!

My name is Araken and I am a student of Chinese Mandarin and also a Linguist. Congratulations for your excellent Course. The materials are firstclass! ...My interest for Mandarin Chinese increases as I study it persistently. A friend of mine indicated your site and I immediately became interested. Your methodology is quite comprehensive and it includes important linguistic aspects of modern teaching. Please accept again my congratulations for your respectable efforts in helping people learn mandarin.

I’ve listened to most of the Mandarin language podcasts since they began emerging on the new media scene, and the good news is that they all have something to offer to the Mandarin language learning community. Being a part of this community, I appreciate the fact that choice among content providers is a good thing for all of us to have. When it comes to the Mandarin language, itself, like any language, it’s made up of the same words regardless of who is teaching it. Of course, which teaching methodology you prefer will depend upon your learning style. After more than a year of listening and searching, I’ve found the methodology that works best for my learning style at CLO (Chinese Learning Online). Here are some of the reasons why:

– Overcoming the Gap with Progressive Lessons. Each CLO lesson is a continuing buildup from the preceding lesson and a preparation for the next lesson. There are no sudden gaps between lessons or chasms between levels. If on the other hand, you expect to stay comfortably and indefinitely at the same level, then CLO won’t let you. Discrete and isolated lessons and levels are not to be found at CLO. There’s just one continuous progression upwards.

– Lesson Roadmap. Each lesson is summarized on a lesson outline, and this serves as a roadmap to show you exactly where you are in the progression of lessons. With this roadmap in hand, you don’t have the sense of aimlessly wandering around from one disjointed lesson to the next. You can start at the beginning if you’re completely new to Mandarin, or you can easily trace the lesson outline to find the starting point that’s most appropriate to your level.
– Full Transcripts. CLO provides full transcripts of all their lessons. As lessons progress to more advanced levels, and an increasing amount of Mandarin is spoken throughout the lesson (and not just in the prepared dialogues), the value of having a full transcript with translations at hand will prove to be tremendous. In addition to the full transcript, there’s a more summarized version of the transcript, which provides the lesson dialogue, vocabulary, and additional study material. What CLO gives away for free on their website is about what other sites provide on a premium subscription basis. What CLO offers on a premium subscription basis – such as the full, complete transcript – is something that you can’t even get on some other sites.
– Active Participation. While the podcasts on some other sites make you a passive listener, CLO offers you more opportunity to actively practice while you listen. Most of us learn better by actively practicing rather than by just passively listening.
– Premium Tools. The premium online tools are simple to use, are well integrated with the lessons, and offer additional opportunities to practice what you’ve learned in order to develop stronger communication skills and retention.
– Video Lesson Dialogues. CLO provides a video of the dialogues for many of the lessons. Though the videos are quite simple in their production, I find that seeing the Mandarin speakers and their natural body language, after having listened to the corresponding lesson, helps me to understand the language and the culture at a deeper, perhaps more intuitive level.
– Extra Features. There are also many other extras, such as lesson notes and hints & tips for each lesson. New online tools and additional features seem to appear all the time.
– Responsiveness. CLO is truly responsive to listener feedback in a way that I haven’t experienced at other sites.
– Reasonable Price. The price of CLO’s subscription is about half of what some other major sites charge, though the overall methodology is more effective. For me, this made subscribing to CLO a no-brainer.
I’ve summarized some of the key reasons why I not only listen to CLO’s podcasts but decided to support it with a premium subscription. I haven’t really tried to provide an all-inclusive list, so I’m sure that I’ve left out many other good reasons for doing so. But I hope that, if nothing else, I’ve been able to point out how the Mandarin language learning community has been enriched by having this new podcaster enter the world of the virtual, online classroom.
好好学习 (Hǎo Hǎo Xuéxí) !

I started listening to your podcast when you first started, maybe a week or two behind. I just returned from China. Your lessons helped a lot. I gave listened to a lot of Chinese lessons and I really like yours. I like the way you describe each individual words with literal translations. I did not realize you just started learning 3 years ago until today when I heard the lesson. What I like about your lessons is your precise, deliberate pronunciation of each word.

Your site has lot’s of toys that I like. I love the way you move the cursor over the words and it translates. I also enjoy the notes in the lyrics section of each pod cast. I really like your approach to learning Chinese. I usually download then convert to CD’s then listen to them in my car. I put all the reviews on one CD and listened to just the reviews for almost a week. Now I have the “hot setup”. I have made CD’s now that have lesson then the review. This is a nice collection. I listen to a lesson and review follows. I have 8 CD’s so far and I don’t think it includes any lesson this week. What a great learning set. I think this 8 CD set would retail for $100 easy! I have bought Commercial CD’s that I have spent a lot of money on that aren’t half as good as your course.
There are several native speaking courses out there, but I choose yours as my favorite. I also love the literal translations which helps as a building block for learning. It’s like the light comes on when you describe the new words. With you being a native English speaker, you understand how hard and confusing their language can be.

I have been enjoying your podcasts. Well done lessons! I have been enjoying the lessons with your company as a way to prepare myself for my next trip back in October. My wife and daughter will be making a trip in the Spring so my wife has been using the lessons to prepare her more for that upcoming trip. So, thank you for the podcasts and the good job of presentation.
As a former language educator, I can see many strong commitments in your lessons to your theory of how second languages are learned in adults. Reaching the learner with contextualized and i+1 content is very important, as I am sure you know... your lessons do a good job on the comprehensible input side of things. It is usually up to the teacher to show the learners the theory of language learning that they, the teachers, believe is best. Actually, you do this already on your podcasts when you explain how the lesson will build on past lessons while introducing some new things to mix in with the old. This is a very i+1 approach... You also have shown that you believe there is variability in language use and that a second language learner needs to be aware of that variability. This is evident in your explaining about the different ways to say the same phrase depending on the area in China of the speaker...
I find that your podcasts are very accessible to me as I have encountered most of the vocabulary many times before. I enjoy the lessons very much because they aren't a great reach for me. I find because of that I have more attention to work on my tones, which are admittedly very bad.

I think Chinese Learn Online is definitely one of the better programs out there. It is a gradual course which takes the learner from total beginner with no previous knowledge, and builds up from there. I used several of the podcasts for a Conversational Chinese course that I taught at our local junior college, and the response from the students was very positive. The methodology is very sound, and the real advantage is that students are not overwhelmed in the beginning, nor are they permanently stuck in a lower level. There's plenty of review to consolidate what was previously learned, and enough new material to make steady progress.

I really like the variety of speakers, voices and accents, and they don't speak too quickly for the beginning learner. And providing the free pinyin on the website is a nice feature which nobody else is offering as far as I can tell! I'll continue to recommend this to my students and to anybody who is interested in learning Chinese. Keep up the great work!