What's better than Chinese Made Easier these days?

I have the second edition which is from 2007. I understand there was no third edition because one of the principals ran off with the money or something. 

At the time this was the state of the art in CSL but I'm sure it's been surpassed in a decade of advancements in pedagogy. I mean, the first character I was ever taught was 我, a terrible way to begin  learning. What textbook do the learners in the know use now?

I tried Duolingo and it's all translations and if you get one word of English out of the  order they expect you're wrong. Translating is not learning Chinese. moreover it's my worst aspect, I'm a terrible translator. I just look at characters and they make sense, or I listen to someone and know what they're saying. 

At the time Chinese Made Easier came out it was a watershed, finally a textbook by people who analyzed how CSL speakers learn and taught  a better way than assuming the learner was a Chinese elementary  school student who already speaks Chinese and just needs to learn characters and idioms. 

I've ot some time to sit down and really get some studying done during Spring Festival. 

I know what you mean. I did CME a long time ago and thought it was pretty good. I don't really think there are any updated and state of the art textbooks. Last year I did the Kubler "Intermediate Spoken Chinese" which is probably the same age as CME and just a user friendly FSI, but I did get a lot out of it. It focused mainly on repetition drills. I have also recently finished the Short Term Listening and the Short Term Spoken and thought they were both useful, I enjoyed doing a book that just focused on listening. I did the Pre-intermediate and would say it was HSK5-ish. But these books are also as old as CME.

I think nowadays, AI is really the way to go. Asking ai what you want help with, asking it give you a speaking routine, getting it to grade articles and give you exercises and that sort of thing. I think is very useful and can be tailored to exactly what you want. I think it's especially useful for Intermediate plus.

That's about where I've been stuck at for years.  I can talk but not about anything complicated  and people lose me in those super-long sentences which  Chinese love. 

Is there a tutorial or something about how to make an AI your language teacher? Or one that's already specialized in CSL?  I tried Deep Mind, even paid for it and uninstalled it after it refused to answer my question too many times.  I use Grok but not any of the others. 

Maybe this should be a separate topic. 

There actually is an unpublished third edition of CME which you can request a link for from their website (https://chinesemadeeasier.org).

Can anyone describe "modern" in terms of what they're looking for relative to CME? Is it just that the vocabulary needs updating, or are there other things you're seeing in newer textbooks that are lacking in those?

IIRC it was the first textbook made by people who had actually struggled through the old stupid way of teaching Chinese to foreigners as if they were Chinese kindergarteners who already spoke Chinese and decided, "we're going to do this right."

I figured in a decade there had been similar improvements.

BLCUP and its ilk were terrible books to learn from. Written by academics with the expectation that you would go all the way to classical Chinese and communicating with Chinese people was an afterthought. 

I've looked at State Department training materials from the 1970s and they're still usable, the language is the same, but CSL  has come a long way since then.  Apparently it's stalled from what I'm hearing. 

I don't see  CSL pedagogy getting any better, honestly.  The few new foreigners there are in my town don't bother  because they  have Google Translate. I'm like some kind of sorcerer because I can speak. I tell them it's not a super-ability, you don't have to be bitten by a radioactive spider, just put the hours in. English speakers are getting less common, too because China can stand on its own two feet while a decade ago speaking English meant ¥¥¥¥¥¥. 

On 2/21/2026 at 4:28 AM, mikelove said:

request a link for from their website (https://chinesemadeeasier.org).

Back in 2023 I was blocked by purple culture I think for using the pinyin converter too much with a vpn - I still haven't been unblocked.

For a time I was still able to access/use the pinyin converter through the chrome extension but now it's been removed from chrome extensions . Do I have to get a new mac to be able to buy CME? Anyone know how to contact site owner?

@ez His contact is in this thread, mate

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/58831-chinese-made-easier-mp3/#comment-457680

@suMMit is he also the site owner for purpleculture.net?

He's the author and contact for CME. I don't know anything about purple culture. I'd be pretty surprised if there was much on there that you couldn't find on Taobao(unless maybe sensitive)