Hi, I have recently begun learning Chinese. I am currently working through RTH 1 and hope to soon begin learning the spoken language in conjunction with the written one. I have done a bit of reading on which books/methods are the best and have created this list of materials to use once I have finished RTH 1 & 2:

Beginning-

Practical Audio-Visual Chinese 1-5
Talks on Chinese Culture
Far East Everyday Chinese III
DeFrancis Beginning Book with Readers

Intermediate-

Taiwan Today
DeFrancis Intermediate Book with Readers and Supplementary Readers
Mini Radio Plays

Advanced-

DeFrancis Advanced Book with Reader
A First Course in Literary Chinese 1-3
The Independent Reader

Is this a sufficient study plan? Should anything be added to or taken away from it?
I have heard about other books such as "Learning Chinese with Newspapers," "News and Views," and "Thought and Society" which seem to be regarded highly within the Chinese learning community. Should these be added? If so, where? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance

Haha, I recognize those books.

I'd recommend skipping out on the DeFrancis books. They're really outdated, and they'll be redundant. Also, "advanced" doesn't really mean advanced with that series. They only teach 1200 characters.

Talks on Chinese Culture and Taiwan today should be switched IMO, because the latter is a bit more difficult than the former. You can probably skip Far East III because it's largely redundant if you've done the PAVC books. I would absolutely recommend doing Thought and Society before you try The Independent Reader. The former is something of a prerequisite for the latter. It even says in the preface to TIR that you should have done T&S or another similar advanced book first.

I'd personally recommend skipping out on A First Course in Literary Chinese in favor of Michael Fuller's An Introduction to Literary Chinese. It's a much better introduction, and involves a much more up-to-date analysis of the grammar of the language. After I finished that book, I returned to Shadick's book and just used it as a reader rather than as a textbook, which was great.

The Newspaper books are pretty good, but I personally didn't use them much. After I took Mini Radio Plays, I took a newspaper reading class that used real newspaper articles, which was more interesting to me. News and Views is useless without the audio, which you won't get unless you're friends with an ICLP student who doesn't mind the risk of taking the audio from the school and giving it to you. I have no idea why they even sell the book outside the school.

This is pretty much the exact progression I took. What you'll find is that while your Chinese can get very "advanced" with this set of textbooks, you'll have a lot of gaps in your knowledge. I have no problem reading scholarly texts on historical phonology or excavated texts, and I have no problem attending graduate-level lectures in my field, or general lectures in a lot of fields.

But simple things stump me. I noticed this when I took my bike to the shop and didn't know how to tell the guy what was wrong with it without resorting to overly simple sentences, like "this...thing...is broken. This part...is bent." How do you say gear? Or pedal? How do you tell someone his shoelaces are untied? How do you say "Twist that into place?" How do you say "that lady just shit her pants?"

Not kidding with that last one, it happened on the bus one day. 「她大在褲子上了。」

The problem is that these books are the product of a mindset that confuses fluency development with literacy development. Another problem is that they teach a Chinese that was spoken 50 years ago, not the language spoken in Taiwan now, so you have to fend for yourself if you don't want to sound weird. Most of the books are also primarily aimed at students living in Taiwan, which gets you the benefit of a lot of in-context learning. So they conveniently ignore a lot of stuff, expecting you to pick it up as you go. I learned most of my food-related vocabulary from restaurant menus, not books.

The solution, if you're not living in Taiwan, is to consume a lot of media once you're able to. Comic books, movies, TV shows, books, etc. Or try those books of 8000 sentences I've been going on about on my blog (which I have to assume is where you got most of those book titles from, because I don't know of anyone else that's been banging on about them for the last couple years), because there's a ton of great, everyday vocabulary in them.

Good luck!

If Taiwan Today is more difficult than Talks on Chinese Culture, then why work through it first? Also, do you know where I could acquire a copy of Thought and Society? I searched Amazon but could not find it. Lastly, could you please provide a link to your blog? I would be interested in reading it.

Ah yeah, I got that wrong. TOCC is more difficult than Taiwan Today, so you should do Taiwan Today first.

Thought and Society could probably be ordered from the Lucky Bookstore at MTC. You'll have to get a Chinese-speaking friend to call though. SMC has it too (they're the publishers), but it may be even more trouble than calling Lucky.

Of course, by the time you're ready for that book, you should be able to place the order yourself.

My blog is called ChineseQuest.

So, the ideal systematic approach would be something like:

Beginning-

Practical Audio-Visual Chinese 1-5
Taiwan Today

Intermediate-

Talks on Chinese Culture
Mini Radio Plays

Advanced-

An Introduction to Literary Chinese
A First Course in Literary Chinese (as a Reader/Supplement?)
Thought and Society
The Independent Reader

All this while using authentic Chinese media the whole way through as a supplement and also to help develop more colloquial speech patterns on top of the literary, "educated" way of speaking.

Thank you for everything!

P.S.

I was already somewhat familiar with your blog. I simply did not know that it belonged to you.

How would you, I wondered, fit in free study resources like zhongwenred.com? Do they make some books superfluous?

I'm not sure if that was directed at me or not, but I personally have no experience with that site, so I can't really comment one way or the other. I'd imagine that a free resource can only take you so far though.

That course of textbooks has seen me progress from essentially a step above raw beginner (some of my classmates during my first term had started from zero at the school just three months earlier) to pretty fluent. I get work as a C-E translator sometimes, usually translating academic papers (at least one of which has been published in a journal), but also doing things like CVs and such. I attend graduate-level lectures in my field, I can read most anything I feel like, I can express myself on pretty much anything I want (though with a fair bit of circumlocution depending on the topic), etc. I seriously doubt any free resource out there will do that, or even any combination of free resources.

When I said earlier that I don't always know how to phrase things, I meant that I don't always know the most idiomatic, authentic, native-sounding way to say things, but I can still say what I want to say. My Chinese isn't as good as I want it to be, but it's enough for what I currently need it for. When I start grad school this fall here in Taiwan (in the Chinese literature department, no less), we'll see how I hold up.