Hey everyone, looking for a Mandarin school in KM or maybe Dali/Lijiang. I already live in KM, so I have

the opportunity to check out the school in person as well.

It's been difficult to find current reviews from KCEL, so if you study there, please let me know your thoughts! Thanks

This doesn't seem like a hard call just based on the first few pages of reviews: www.gokunming.com/[...]

The positive reviews generally appear to be transparent fakes: obviously written by non-native English speakers, and often speaking in meaninglessly vague terms ("I feel good", "The teacher's class is very interesting", etc.) or about silliness such as the food at their Mid-Autumn Festival party.

The negative reviews are persuasive: they are written in idiomatic English and are specific and vivid in their particulars.

I would steer well clear.

The reviews in non-idiomatic English might be written by foreign students whose native language is not English.

@cloudtrapezer, that is a fair point. Most of the non-idiomatic reviews ring false to me, but I was starting to doubt myself. So I went back and took a closer look.

Comparing the first few pages of KCEL reviews to those for some competing schools (TenWest, Huanyang and Keats), I found the following.

- Competing schools: Plenty of positive reviews written in idiomatic English, just a few non-idiomatic reviews.

- KCEL: Three idiomatic reviews (two very negative, one mixed) and a dozen non-idiomatic reviews (almost all very positive).

That is quite a contrast. One can imagine a legitimate explanation, but it seems like it would require a stretch. Especially since the schools appear to have roughly similar demographics, at least based on my impression of the class photos on the listing pages.