Textbooks for intermediate/advanced Chinese

[perjp]

I am looking for teaching material for intermediate/advanced Chinese.

I will soon finish my second semester studying in China, and I am

generally disappointed by the quality of the teaching material here.

Most of the texts we read are boring, the vocabulary isn't neccesarily

very useful, and the English is atrocious.

I'm thinking of going for self-study with a carefully handpicked

selection of teaching material next semester. I need some tips on

good teaching material that goes beyond the basic level, and which

is tailored for English speakers.

Some tips as to what I'm looking for:

- Discussion of problems encountered by English speakers especially

- Reasonably good English (no Chinglish please)

- Discussion of language style (e.g. how to express yourself formally,

informally, and in general how to enrich your language).

- Prepares you for reading newspapers

- Gives me a good clue as to which characters I need to know to actually

read and understand texts (at my current level, I find Yuedu class to be

the most difficult, since I often do not understand the most important

characters/words in any given sentence, meaning that I have only a

very vague notion of the meaning of a text if I read it quickly without

looking up lots of words.)

PS: I've got the book "Developing Writing Skills in Chinese," which looks

very interesting

[Altair]

You may want to try the following link for some good material:

http://www.cheng-tsui.com/sb_list3-csm.asp?subcode6=LNGI,LNSI&subcode5=C,CA,C7,CK&region=C

Chen & Tsui has some good material for intermediate students.