University of Iowa Collection of 900 Lessons

[MaLaTang]

Ok, ive been reading a lot of putonghua this year. I started out on slowchinese.com and read all the articles. I was looking for new reading material and stumbled upon this website from the university of Iowa. http://collections.uiowa.edu/chinese/LoginPage.html You will need to create a new free account to start learning. They offer 300 beginner lessons, 300 intermediate, and 300 advanced. The lessons will open in a NEW WINDOW when you click on them, and depending on how slow or fast your internet speed is, take a few seconds to load. Each lesson is introduced by a vocabulary quiz and then is followed by 7 multiple choice questions pertaining to a text you are required to read. The lesson concludes with a repeat of the vocabulary quiz to help you lock in the new vocab. They then give you a score based on your reading time and number of correct responses. I have been using the intermediate lessons, and they helped me improve my vocabulary and knowledge of chinese culture considerably. ENJOY

[Gymnosopher]

Just had a quick look at this and seems like a great find, much more than you'd expect from other 'free' resources. And for anyone wanting their life made easier by a direct link:

The Chinese Reading World by The University of Iowa

Just click through register, make the account (no email confirmation is needed?), and you're in to the instruction page and a few clicks from the lessons - choosing level, unit then lesson.

[Olle Linge]

I checked out some lessons at random. It does indeed seem very good. I especially like that fact that most of the lessons actually deal with Chinese culture, so even if I don't learn many new words, I still learn about China. Having someone ask you questions is also really good, might work for test preparation if you don't have more suitable material.

[chaiknees]

Direct links: Beginning Level | Intermediate Level | Advanced Level

If you just want text and audio, just click on "Audio" of each lesson instead of "HTML".

[creamyhorror]

The Univ. of Iowa site has actually been posted here a few times and also mentioned in the resource thread, but not had its own dedicated thread AFAIK. So it's good that you've taken the initiative to do that. Paike attempted to get the audio files for it, but no dice.

My own thanks goes to Scoobyqueen for mentioning it in this thread. I've been using it over the past 2 weeks - it's in nice digestible chunks.

[cababunga]

Yes, it was mentioned many times, but I always assumed that it was all in Flash. It never occurred to me that to get HTML I should click on Audio. Thanks to chaiknees for figuring that out.

[Matty]

It looks like the content is good, but they really could do with some better design, it's a little cramped and hard to navigate and use for me.

Anyone notice a lot of the links look exactly like the text? I have to swipe my mouse over it to see if it's a link of not.

But none the less seems to be a good find.

[mrkarahan]

Thanks to you guys. This will be pretty helpful for me to improve my chinese again.

It is quite easy and joyful in this concept.

Thanks again.

[heliogabalo]

Thank you all for this precious resources. I was looking for something like that. I don't have much time lately to syudy chinese, so these online resources are very handy.

[Pendragon]

I just started with the Intermediate readings, looks like this website will very helpful!

I wonder, what kind of REI score (reading efficienty index) do you guys get? So far I'm stuck between 1 and 2, seems pretty low.. I get most questions right but I'm kinda slow.

[MaLaTang]

i get rei scores of .02 sometimes...but im a slow reader anyway

[Pendragon]

If I don't try to understand every word I get to REI 2.5. It's actually stimulating to get these scores after the assginment, pushes me to try harder (and for understanding movie subtitles I'll have to get way faster still..)