The only thing bad about Purple Culture was that shipping took a long time. I bought the Contemporary Chinese set for level 1 students, and I have been using it to self teach myself Chinese. I can tell that working through this series will be great as the format of the lessons, etc, is really good for learning Chinese. Purple Culture offered good prices for the books and was a 1-stop-all-inclusive place where I could buy the whole series with one order, rather than buying each textbook/character book/exercise book serperately as I would have had to on Amazon.