I have just started going through Mandarin using Skritter and New Practical Chinese Reader all on self study.
I am curious how far one can go if one completes it upto New Practical Chinese Reader 3 ?
Will I get to read Chinese newspapers post that.

What are the other best books on Skritter Chinese for self study?

Jacob.. Inputs from you!
Also @Nick where are you feeding 30 new words a day on your 3 month quest?

Hi Sandeep,

NPCR and Skritter should be a great combo for starting your self study routine, I wish you the best of luck! To be honest, my exposure to NPCR is rather limited. I used book 5, briefly, a few years ago but dropped it to study Tang and Song poetry with my teacher instead. However, I assume that NPCR is like many of the other textbooks on the market, so I would say that study through book three should give you a very strong understanding of the basics of Chinese.

I don't think that you will be reading newspapers after (only) studying these textbooks, however. It isn't that the textbooks don't offer the right direction and focus, it is simply that the number of words (and specifically new characters) that you will be exposed to after three books wont be enough to understand everything you find in a newspaper.

Fear not! As you progress through these books on your own be sure to fill in your study routine with other supplementary materials, such as online articles, short stories, blog posts, etc. Those tools will help to expand the scope of your language understanding, and give you more context in which to process Chinese as a language.

When it came time for me to start reading books and articles in Chinese I put the textbooks aside and actually started to focus on reading more "authentic" material instead. During the process I realized that I already knew A LOT of the characters being used, but when they were combined in new ways to create different words I was lost, over time however my vocabulary started to expand exponentially.

The key to understanding newspapers or any other texts is a healthy dose of contextual understanding mixed with comprehensible input. Having a good background in the material you are reading (especially in a foreign language) will really help you to understand the text even if you can't understand every word. Comprehensible input refers to the idea that you already understand a large part of what you are reading. I am of the opinion that true comprehension of a text or article comes when you already understand about 85% of what you are reading (this is not scientific, but simply based on personal experience and teaching observation).

For a few more tips on this concept I would suggest you check out a post I wrote on the blog a while back: http://blog.skritter.com/2011/11/improve-your-chinese-reading.html

A good place to start after you've gone through some of the NPCR books would be graded readers, you can check out the Chinese Breeze books here:
http://www.cheng-tsui.com/store/products/chinese_breeze

Skritter's Chinese 101 list is set-up in a self study way, but we only focus on covering the basics. There are tons of other vocabulary frequency lists on the site, but I would ignore them unless you already have a very large lexicon. The best way to learn anything is through context, and those don't provide any. Better to reference them later when you already know most of the words found within.

I hope that helps answer some of your questions, if you have more just let me know.

Again, best of luck!

-Jake

Regarding "already knowing most of the words found within."
Is there are way to see how large a percentage of a word list you have already studied, without going through each section and counting manually?
I'd like to be able to see fractions on the following page:
http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=list9
so that it would read something like this:
http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/7717/screenshot20120717at507.png

Hi jake,
Xie xie for these valuable inputs! I will try to run through NPCR ASAP. I envy your characters and words learned stats. They are humongous.
Many thanks.
Sandeep

I second Laspimon's request; this would be very helpful information.

@Sandeep: I agree with Jake's suggestions and would also add Chinesepod as a good tool for self-study. They cover some very practial real-life situations and teach the kind of vocabulary that textbooks tend to leave out. It's good for learning more about Chinese culture too.

I'm using the npcr books in my degree and can say there is no way you will be reading newspapers, although I have only studied books 1 and 2 so far. You would probably be at the stage of understanding the basics of the article and picking out some key words. I think the books are ok for learning, although my Chinese teacher was horrendous and I didn't do enough of the workbook exercises. I spent 1 semester studying 1 book, spending 6 hours on each lesson.

@junglegirl many thanks.
@bjnsharp many thanks.

I have almost completed book 2 (one and a half chapter to go) and now know 790 characters and 585 words. So at the end of book 2 you will only know some 810 characters and 635 words or so. Starting with chapter 20 or so, the focus shifted to vocabulary acquisition. These are the official numbers - the amount of characters and words you will know after finishing each book (see the excerpts from the books below for more information):

Book Characters Words
---------------------
1 350 400
2 700 800
3 1000 1600
4 1200 2400

However, I will know more than 800 characters and less than 700 unique words after finishing the second book so these numbers should obviously be taken with a grain of salt. Skritter's NPCR list gives the following numbers:

Book New words Total
--------------------
1 523 523
2 653 1176
3 690 1866
4 806 2672
5 1111 3783

Skritter only counts unique words but you get the picture. Starting with the second half of book 2 you will learn 4 new words for every new character. So you will get a lot of repetition and those 1200 or so characters will literally be burned into your mind by the end of book 4.

The end of book 2 states:

"After having studied 26 lessons, you should have mastered over 800 new words, about 700 Chinese characters and 197 key sentence patterns. You have studied Chinese phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, and Chinese characters at the beginner's level. You have also gained some knowledge of Chinese culture. Now, you should be able to converse about daily life in Chinese and read simple Chinese texts.
This is a good beginning. The next four volumes of the New Practical Chinese Reader will help you to communicate more freely in Chinese and to further understand the Chinese culture. Besides, you must be eager to learn the further adventures of our characters in China in the coming year."

The end of book 3 states:

"Now that you have finished Book One to Book Three of The New Practical Chinese reader, you should have learned over 1600 elementary vocabulary items, of which 1300 are required to master, along with over 1000 Chinese characters and the basic grammatic items with 300 key sentences. You can express your ideas about daily life and certain social topics and communicate with other people. With the help of a dictionary you can also read simple essays.
Congratulations of having completed the initial stage of your study of Chinese.
Book Four of The New Practical Chinese Reader will guide you to the intermediate level of Chinese."

The end of book 4 states:

"Congratulations on having completed the study of Book One to Book Four of the New Practical Chinese Reader. The fifty lessons of the first four volumes of the NPCR have not only covered every aspect of your daily life, but also touched upon many interesting topics of Chinese culture and society. Along with all these, you have mastered about 2400 elementary vocabulary items (of which 1900 are required), over 1200 Chinese characters, and the basic grammatic items with about 400 key sentences. Now you can communicate more freely in Chinese, and you have laid a very good foundation for your further study of the language.
You will start with a new stage when learning Book Five and Book Six of the NPCR, which will help you improve your Chinese, and in which you will find a garden of Chinese literature and culture."

Thanks for this comprehensive detail.