>>211770847
Defrancis Chinese has been the onramp for reading Chinese for me. It’s dry, but it’s extensive and rigorous. Goes from 0 known Chinese to an intermediate level character knowledge but an advanced level vocabulary (like 7000-8000 words formed with the 1200 most common characters) over 3 levels of readers [covering over half a million characters of text in the readers alone]. It’s for traditional chinese but I view that as a plus and the main textbook’s character text has supplementary lessons specifically for going back over all the new characters in simplified script so you can learn that too.

I got it basically because I wanted something that I knew that if I put the time into it I would be literate. Currently about halfway through the beginner stage (so 1 semester of content) and it’s improved my chinese reading, spoken, and auditory comprehension dramatically relative to the time I put in. Audios are all online. Pdfs are all findable too, used volumes are super cheap since it is old and used to be popular. The character text is literally just the main textbook but entirely in Hanzi instead of pinyin/english.