Resources for learning to read Chinese newspapers (in simplified Chinese characters)?

Question

Many textbooks for learning Standard Chinese, e.g. New Practical Chinese Reader, focus on conversational Chinese. In these textbooks, the text in the lessons are always dialogues. This type of textbook does not prepare you very well for reading newspaper texts. For this reason, I would like to know whether there are any resources that help you learn to read Chinese newspapers.

Answer 1

There are several books that help you learn to read Chinese newspapers, for example:

• Wu Xieyao: TIMES - Newspaper Reading Course of Intermediate Chinese (I) (时代：中级汉语报刊阅读教程（上册）). BLCUP, 2006. (235 pages) ISBN 9787561916650. Wu Xieyao is TCFL teacher at Shanghai Normal University. The publisher does not provide information about the level required for the book beyond the indication “intermediate” in the title.
• Wu Xieyao: TIMES - Newspaper Reading Course of Intermediate Chinese (II) (时代：中级汉语报刊阅读教程（下册）). BLCUP, 2007. (247 pages) ISBN 9787561917787.
• Staehle, Susian: Aktuelle Texte aus chinesischen Zeitungen und Zeitschriften mit deutschen Erläuterungen. Peking University Press, 2004. (377 pages) ISBN 978-7-301-06653-9. This book requires knowledge of roughly 1500 characaters and 3000 words. After working through the book, you should know 3000 characters and 6000 words. The book consists of 20 lessons, each of which contains four texts. Each text is accompanied by a vocabulary list and a reading comprehension exercise.

Also worth reading:

• Ng, Ginny: How to Learn To Read Chinese Newspapers: The Ultimate Guide, Fluent U Chinese blog, 30.09.2014.