I'm looking for some beginner reading material to help remember characters and words in context. I have a copy of Chinese Breeze Wrong Wrong Wrong but it's above my level. The author says you're ready to read it if you can understand the introduction on the back cover. I can read about half the characters/words. So far I've made my way through the Skritter Chinese 101 list and have a started HSK 1. I've also had a bit of private tutoring in the past.

Can anyone recommend some reading material for me? Preferably some readers available online or something I can have shipped to Canada. Or would it be better to wait until I have some more HSK levels under my belt and then start the Chinese Breeze readers?

spend the money and get a subscription on chinesepod! its worth the money! they have tons of old lessons and each week a new one for beginners.

chinesepod will never disappoint you!

Don't just add a bunch of HSK lists. Without context it's very hard to remember those characters. Instead, find content, and use that content to populate your lists. Also, since listening is the hardest part, audio should be your primary concern.

Personally, I found the ChinesePod website to be very annoying, but I LOVE the content. It's really great content. Just be ready to be frustrated trying to find what you want.

Try jumping right into the elementary lessons, and add every character you don't know - not just their vocab list. Then all of these characters will be in context and you will know them in a sentence.

I really enjoy ChinesePod audio portion. I was a little put off by their website. I too found it very annoying. That's a great idea about building my own lists. I'll give that a shot. I've been using Yoyo Chinese too, so I can do the same thing.

My original plan was to go through the HSK as I thought that might cover a bunch of the Chinese Breeze readers. My short/medium term goal is to be able to read the level 1 readers.

Thanks again

thanks for the advice. The chinese breeze books look promising.

A few more characters would probably be useful before you begin the readers. There are worse places to start than the HSK 1 and HSK 2 lists. They will give you the foundation to start working with the readers.

try:
nciku.com
http://www.chinesestoriesplatform.com/

or for simple sentences:
http://www.yellowbridge.com
http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/wordsearch.php
(for the word search)

I havent tried it but:
http://chinese.fluentu.com/home.php

worth a try.
I find if i learn a list of words (eg hsk 1, 2)
then look through chinese news sites for the words.
i might not be able to read the whole passage, but im getting used to seeing the characters.

Or i use the above sites for example sentences

when I had under my belt the first level class book only, I also couldn't read even the easiest Chinese Breeze stories.
But then, using Skritter, I finished one of the Chinese Breeze lists (extra words), reviewed my class book (1st level and a bit of 2d), added some additional words (around those two lists) and now I can read it! I also put some efforts into grammar.

Overall I spent 2 months to get these results.

At the very beginning it probably makes more sense to start on a book like "New Practical Chinese Reader". You'll get some simple sentences within brief dialogs, but they gradually build up content.

Also, I would recommend using Tuttle's Chinese Learner's Dictionary (available on Pleco) as it has sample sentences for each definition. The sentences are simple enough that you can start to read them after knowing a limited amount of vocabulary.

In my experience, you need more than the number of vocabulary words mentioned on the Chinese Breeze books to really be able to read them, but they're excellent practice once you reach that level.

Don't get discourage! Effort pays off in the end, even though it can sometimes feel like one isn't making any progress.

http://www.plecoforums.com/download/file.php.pqb?id=158&sid=744497e7bd7a479b82a3555a24e8b8db

Www.chinesereadingpractice.com

These are two i used a bit. the second has lots of material ranging in level, with translation and some keywords. It is quite difficult to find good material, I have just started buying a few books. I have 4 Chinese breeze books on the way. 3 level 2 and 1 level 3. Hoping they are going to be useful.

Has anyone tried to read a novel in Chinese, and If so what level were you at? I'm not expecting to read it very quickly, but a couple of pages a day maybe. There are quite a lot of cheap novels on amazon, Harry potter, davinci code e.t.c

Try fluentu.com, it's for free. I have briefly started using it, they have new own made video courses like "Making friends and drinking coffee" and "Table for Two". Slow and clear tempo. Nice with some variation in studies.
I don't think they have any easy way yet to interact with skritter but I just add new words to an own 'fluentu' list I have.

Full disclosure -- I'm the author -- but you could try the easy readers on SquidForBrains.com. I wrote them because the materials you're mentioning were too difficult for my students and for early readers of CFL/CSL in general.

Susan you mafan is the easiest one -- you can breeze through chapter 1 after a couple of weeks of class. The book gets progressively more difficult, though the number of new characters and words introduced in a chapter is not all that high.

Anna mei banfa! is somewhat more difficult -- more or less a second-year level. Lots of words.

I also have a series of repetitive children's style books intended for second-language learners coming out starting next week. The first two are "Pandarella" and "The Three Pandas".

All these books feature high levels of repetition, simple language, high-frequency words, and spaces between words. Plenty of time for you to struggle to parse sentences later in life. For now, just get comfortable reading in characters. The PandaRiffic readers are also color-coded for tone.

http://www.SquidForBrains.com/store