Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin is my primary focus in language learning, in fact, it's my primary learning endeavour, to which I commit my first waking hours each day.

Bibliography

[Elementary|Intermediate|Advanced] Chinese Reader, John DeFrancis
Personally, this is the main resource I have been using for the past couple years to progress in my learning of Chinese. There are a few reasons for this: The book uses primarily traditional characters, which are my preferred version of the characters. After all, simplified characters are easy to identify once the traditional ones have been learned. Also, since one of my goals is reading Classical, I need to learn the traditional ones anyway. Second, the book doesn't waste time with explanations. I already knew a fair bit of how the language works before approaching these books. I want to jump in reading actual texts, and this book is specifically done with that aim. Third, and related, the book provides pages upon pages upon pages of nothing but chinese text. Each lesson introduces a number of new characters, words, and thereafter it just provides plenty of texts for practice, using the vocabulary learned so far. I highly recommend this book to anyone wishing to learn the language, especially for reading.