I have hit a snag in my studies. I really don't know what to study next...

My teacher and I were talking about this today and neither one of us really knows. For reference, I have studied the following text books:

New Practical Chinese Reader 1-4
Short Term Spoken Chinese 2nd edition 1-5
Short Term Spoken Chinese 1st Edition 6 (They haven't published the second edition yet.)
汉语精读课本1年纪下册 (obscure one, in essence an essay book with fairly genuine essays)

Since I have a private tutor, we are in control of my study materials. The Last text book series mentioned goes quite a long ways in terms of skill levels so I can always just keep studying them if we come up with nothing else. I don't particularly want to start just grinding HSK books. I have noticed on this site some people with rather impressive Mandarin skills. My questions are, when you reached that situation, what did you study and do you have any suggestions?

Well I'm not at your level yet, I've done "Short Term" 1-4 and some of "Taiwan Today" on my own textbook-wise, plus a month or two of HSK prep leading up to me not taking the test :)

I still do some lessons every once in a while out of Taiwan Today or "All things Considered" ("advanced" reader my friend gave me).

But to build vocabulary, practice reading, and even reinforce grammar/phrases, I would say just start reading real stuff. Comics, short books, etc. More fun than textbooks (to me anyway) and you can still practice vocabulary you find or write down interesting grammar as much or as little as you want.

In general, chinese-forums.com is a great place to look for materials on and offline, http://www.chinese-forums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=54

Good luck!

I'm not familiar with the books you mentioned, but I would echo what Hobbes said - start using real stuff. There's so much online - radio stations ( http://radio.bbtv.cn ), podcasts ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/simp/services/podcasts.shtml ), TV dramas ( http://sugoideas.com ), novels ( http://book.sina.com.cn/ with http://paper-republic.org/ for ideas). I've been using this kind of material for the past year. Even though I still barely understand half of it, my listening and reading has come such a long way since.

"start using real stuff" 同意了

But BBC is 不正之风， here are some excellent alternatives, the top recommendation is http://www.wenming.cn/

http://gov.people.com.cn/
http://npc.people.com.cn/
http://cpc.people.com.cn/
http://kxfz.people.com.cn/
http://www.wenming.cn/
http://www.chinamil.com.cn/

Aside from the obvious answer to start reading and listening to news, novels etc "real" material...

Consider working through 近义词，短语，成语 etc. dictionaries. 近义词词典 are a pretty great way to get new vocab since you're getting a deeper understanding of words and how to use them. Your teacher can help with this, explaining words you don't quite get or that aren't defined well or whatnot. I haven't found 反义词词典 to be as useful but ymmv. If you start looking at a 成语词典 (and you will need to do this sooner or later) you'll definitely want someone to go through and mark out the ones that are commonly used since most dictionaries will contain loads more than you really need. For 口语 nothing beats doing 绕口令, even chinese people do those, especially anyone going for a position in media. 绕口令 aren't really tongue-twisters so much as targeted practice to ensure your pronunciation is clear and correct.

Lastly, don't forget to work on your 表达能力! In is easy, out is hard. Write write write, speak speak speak, and be sure to challenge yourself for both. But you and your teacher can figure out how to do that on your own.

west316,

Lots of good suggestions here. I side with the chorus; go native as much as you can. If my Chinese were at your level, that's what I would be doing.

If you want textbooks though--and it sounds like you do--then I have suggestions.

Are you living in China? Check out BLCUP. They sell advanced textbooks that don't cost much (30-60 kuai on average).

http://www.blcup.com

Three that I have:

Elementary Chinese Reader 4 (advanced level, really)
Advanced Spoken Chinese
Introducing Australia (the entire book is readings about Australia. Upper intermediate level.)

You've done NPCR 1-4. NPCR 6 just came out and it's good. 5 was reviewed less charitably; it's been out a while.

Textbooks made in the USA:

China Scene

http://www.amazon.com/China-Scene-Advanced-Multimedia-Language/dp/0887273300

And from the Princeton Series:

All Things Considered
Anything Goes
Readings in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/plpmc.html

Nick, our resident Skritter guru, has worked through most of these.

I personally think there are some good suggestions in the following articles (all related to the same thing). I've started doing this exact thing and have already noticed some great benefits.

http://benross.net/wordpress/getting-started-on-%E8%9C%97%E5%B1%85/2010/04/05/

http://benross.net/wordpress/adventures-in-chinese-television-%E3%80%8A%E5%A5%8B%E6%96%97%E3%80%8Bwrap-up/2010/03/13/

http://benross.net/wordpress/halfway-through-%E3%80%8A%E5%A5%8B%E6%96%97%E3%80%8B/2009/12/13/

@JB: Definitely don't just sit back and watch, though, take his advice on "power watching". It's too easy to tune out and just ignore the stuff you don't understand.

James

Oh yeah. That's what I've been doing, and it's been great. Not only learning lots of great stuff, but I feel like my comprehension is already improving. Especially for northern accents, which I don't get too much of in Chinatown here.

News?

http://news.google.com.hk/nwshp?hl=zh-CN&tab=wn
http://ifeng.com
http://www.caing.com/

I used to spend an hour reading a paragraph out loud to a teacher trying to get pronunciation right.

At the moment I'm looking through some 成语 stories with my teacher.

Looking at classic poems or short stories (like Lu Xun) is fun too.

If you liked 奋斗, you'll probably also like 我的青春谁做主, many of the actors are the same. I also liked 我是一棵小草. 蜗居 is interesting from a political and sociological point of view.
For something different, I'd recommend 血色浪漫 or 甜蜜蜜, both about developments since the cultural revolution.

My personal favourite is 老大的幸福, it's rewarding both from the cultural (小城市 vs. 大城市) http://movie.video.sina.com.cn/teleplay/lddxf/001.htmand the linguistic perspective (e.g. 东北 accent): http://movie.video.sina.com.cn/teleplay/lddxf/001.html. I haven't watched all of the episodes yet, however.

Wow. Thanks for all of the suggestions. I haven't had time to flip through all of the links, but sifting through this thread will definitely be of great use. Thanks.

As for using native sources, I have two main reasons I haven't done that before. The first is good old fashioned laziness. The class structure I am currently using works really well, and if we change types of source material then we have to rearrange everything. Also my review habits were based around wholesale lifting textbooks off of the bookshelf and reviewing them. If Skritter really works out for me, and it seems it will, then the review aspect of the problem is removed.

The second is that... most mainland sources of TV and news frankly aren't that great. I haven't checked that google.hk link yet, but even most Chinese people look at me in a puzzled manner if I bring up trying to read a newspaper. They always ask, why? The quality of news from international sources is better, and the type of language you see in a newspaper isn't often replicated elsewhere. I equated reading a newspaper with a party trick and the Chinese people agreed with me. Chinese isn't like English. When using English, reading a newspaper is of great use, not just for new but also for improving language skills.

I may take up reading magazine articles, though. Most of my text books now just wholesale lift out magazine articles for their essays anyway. I may also take up reading books. I have been slowly but surely heading in that direction for a while.

Thank you all for all of the replies. I will definitely need to sift through all of these links.

I did find it enjoyable and could completely empathize with reading JB's comment about northern accents. I arrived in China not even being able to say 你好. I have always known the northern accents. I don't have the hardcore 北京 accent, but I definitely have a northern one. It took me months and months to get use to the southern pronunciations.

Haha. Well I started learning mostly from Taiwanese type accents, so moving to Chinatown was quite a shock. The Fujian accent can be quite hard to get used to! Even knowing exactly what to expect from it is hard. Here's an example from my blog:

http://jeremybarwick.blogspot.com/2010/01/conversations-in-chinatown-tender.html

I picked up a Readers Digest here (yip, same idea - relatively simple articles from a variety of sources, but cheap - 10 RMB - and in Chinese) which helped.

I also find HSK exercises alright - it lets me see where I get grammar wrong so I can internalize it and then 'forget' it (i.e. make it unconscious).

For both, take any words you look up and write them down. When you are done, put the important ones in Skritter and ignore the rest (how you define important is up to you but it is frustrating to spend a lot of time studying what you don't need to know, for me brand names, company names, and scientific terms would be things I would tend to leave out).