eChineseLearning

I was offered one free introductory lesson. However I was first obliged to supply my credit card information. And my advance full course payment of AU$2,382.24 [11,480 RMB] was processed immediately, with my request for a full refund being refused on at least three occasions. EChineselearning is an unethical online trader dealing in lies and deception and deserves to be black-listed.

We signed up under certain policies. They changed them. We want a refund but they won't give any. They change on a whim and don't pay back. It's a scam.

I contacted them, and they offered a free lesson, which I tried, but ultimately decided not to hire them because of their rigid price structure. Since then, they have been emailing me and calling me regularly, despite my at-first polite then later forceful requests that they stop. Some extremely pushy person called Doris Zhang ignores all requests that they stop. Do not provide contact information with this company, or you'll regret it.

The teachers try their best. The classes are not structured, so you have to determine structure of the lessons yourself. As a student this is not really the service one signs up for. The connection problems are frequent due to their teachers working from home with power failures or a poor internet connection. Although they have an office that their teachers can work from. I feel EChineseLearning is very expensive for what you get. You also have to pay additional fees to buy the textbooks which are not included in the package. If you want to learn chinese, these may be other providers that will offer a better service.

I am an expat working in China. Someone recommended me to use echineselearning to improve my Chinese. The person that recommended me the service obviously did not try it out first because the service is simply not worth paying for. The teachers were all very young and not really trained. Their English was poor and it was very hard for me as a beginner to feel like I was advancing. Their customer service is a joke. I am not very tech savvy and they made me feel stupid. I still believe that online education is the way of the future, but definitely not with echineselearning.

I've recently succumbed to their advertising - "Our focus is on you", The Economist testimonials - and subscribed to their "service". Not only did they "assign" a tutor who's booked out for the next two weeks, they are not even refunding my first month subscription fee. The fee is rather high (double?) too, its about $300 a month for up to 3 lessons a week. I hope Paypal will return my money, given this HK company's only reaction to a Paypal dispute was to block my access completely:)

Lessons learned:
Don't trust advertising (duh), even if it comes from The Economist
Never get into a subscription deal, only consider pay-per-lesson variants like they have on italki.com
eChineseLearning.com is particularly bad because you're not in control of anything - you only get to select a time slot, and if your "tutor" is not available that day (which is common, unless you book like a month in advance) you get a random substitution.

PS - italki.com turned out to be awesome, I regret of not starting from it to begin with.

UPDATE: Funnily, their michael_echineselearning dude (via Skype) has been blackmailing me to remove all my comments or they won't refund any money, sheesh.
"basically, what we said [to Paypal] is that we will refund the payment as soon as you have cancelled all comments online about echineselearning, including but not limited to the ones on twitter and reddit."

Not improving after taking more than 20 lessons. Most importantly, customer service cover limited time and reps speak horrible English. Very unprofessional. I even decided to refund.

They are very rigid and its incredibly expensive for poor teaching. Would not recommend.