I am just restarting to learn Mandarin using Rocket Chinese because I had been too busy teaching and building new courses at my current school in China.
Positive:
1. Listening, Reading (in pinyin - latin script and Simplified - chinese script), Writing (initially in pinyin) and speaking is available from the very first lesson.
2. Step by step in a logical fashion based on what would seem to be logical needs of a person new to learning the language.
3. Clear and colourful interface that is easy to follow.
4. There are now cute little incentive badges that give you a sense of your progress. These complement the already colourful interface, but I think this is helpful for both younger and older learners
While I like the course layout very much, there are just a couple of tiny problems that I suspect will be addressed quite quickly on the technical side.
1. I haven't yet figured out how to prevent my browser (Firefox) from asking permission everytime RocketChinese wants to use the camera/microphone. Because I am used to the 7/24 customer service, email is obviously slower, but their responses are usually within 24 hours... so, not intolerable.
2.