Hey there!

I've enjoyed Skritter for about one month or two and plan to reactivate the subscription. There is one question I'd like to raise and learn from community's practice:

I live outside of China, rarely meeting/seeing Chinese people and try to learn Chinese by myself from the Internet. Skritter teaches to write (and recognize, but imho mostly write) characters. Pimsleur teaches me talk (and read a bit, but imho this is not Pimspleur's final frontier). Noone teaches to hear/understand - for that I might need a real lessons probably. Where can I teach to read? Writing single characters or words on Skritter seems not be enough (and a bit boring even). Where can I have some very easy texts to strengthen my skills. I think that I know about 200 characters more or less and even more hearable words from Pimsleur.

And in general: which combination of resources proves its best for you?

My aim is to communicate in Chinese and also being able to read and write at least simple texts. My dream is to leave for a few years in China one day and I'd like to come prepared and enjoy learning another language meanwhile.

Thanks

You might try reading the Chinese Breeze Graded Readers. They tell longer stories but make a point to only use the same several hundred characters, so it's a lot easier to start off with. We have several of the textbooks' vocab lists on Skritter.

Otherwise, textbooks are a good way to get easy passages to read, and doing the writing exercises will help a lot, too.

I would also recommend The Lady in the Painting, by
Claudia Ross. It comes with a CD rom.

thank you, gentlemen! I'll try both. In general, if you have other recommendations, I'll gratefully embrace them. anything skritter-complementary that will make me a better Chinese speaker/reader/writer

PS: books in softcopy (download for money) will be warmly welcomed as well.

I haven't really been using it myself, but the Confucius Institute has transformed its website into a pretty impressive learning center and is investing large sums into web ads.

E.g. http://adult.chinese.cn/en/

This page http://www.clavisinica.com/resources.html also has readings for beginners (stepping stones) and intermediate (voices project) comes with audio too to listen while u read.

I also recommend the lady in the painting only using 300 characters - Book Depositoty is a good price and has free worldwide postage http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780300125160/The-Lady-in-the-Painting

Cheers,
Donna

When I was a chinesepod.com subscriber (still love it, it's just that I graduated from it :) , I used it mainly as reading practice. You can try to read everything yourself, then use the audio and pinyin to check yourself, and the pinyin and text is built into the mp3 files, which is great for practice on the go. The downside of chinesepod for reading practice is that they purposefully introduce lots of new vocabulary. But I wouldn't recommend chinesepod as a phenomenal textbook supplement, not as a replacement.

Unfortunately children's books in Chinese are harder than you would think, with lots of characters that aren't of primary importance to adults (hopping, skipping, catching bugs...) and all kinds of onomatopoeias (boing, splat).

Chris

Well, till now I've purchased 4 "Chinese Breeze" (1-st level) books from http://www.chinasprout.com/ (their prices including shipping were better then in some other places). Hope that I'll get them relatively soon. Also, there was another recommended book from Yale with 300 characters. We'll see.

I might get some chinesepod subscription along with the skritter subscription renewal.

I think you will find a list for the Yale Mirror Series Book with 300 characters is already on Skritter.

ChinesePod is a lot of fun. I don't know of any better resource for a quick refresh (or introduction) if you need to get conversant on some very specific topic in a hurry. It is also very nicely integrated with Skritter. You can use "Skritter Lite" directly on the web site, and I recently noticed that a vocab list I created on ChinesePod was already waiting for me on Skritter without requiring me to do anything to "export" it.

Good idea. Did not knew about the integration. Reactivated my Skritter subscription meanwhile. I'll consider to join Chinesepod in the coming few months if any kind of a promotional package deal wouldn't pop up earlier :)

Just got first four Chinese Breeze books :) Huh... but the stories aren't happy. They are about murders, robbery and... Siamese twins. I feel extremely puzzled to meet this kind of textbook as a Mandarin newbie.

Feel very happy. I've never seen anything like that in my mandarin text books. It's all meeting people at bus stops, and being a foreign student, and courtesy at friends' houses, or otherwise incredibly contrived stories with lots of people's mandarin being praised in them.

Well, I meet Mandarin-speaking people mostly in sushi restaurants in Tel-Aviv. And my vocabulary (~150 words) is enough to ask about anything simple. The problem is that I usually can't get the answer :)