I was wondering if people had favorite programs for learning to read Chinese (ideally I would love something like the John De Francis Books, that would help me translate full sentences as I am doing well with Characters but often miss nuance)?

Thanks
AT

My girlfriend gave me taiwanese middle school text books with stories inside. It's pretty nice to practice reading.

Although I do wonder too if there are any books like those you mentioned.

Yellowbridge.com has a program that translates characters and words that you select into English. I'm not sure if it does phrases. Clavis Sinica ( http://clavisinica.com ) has a similar product. There is also reading material at different levels on their site.

I had the first two books in the De Francis Chinese Reader series, but lost them. I really liked them because whoever wrote the stories was clever enough to create short bits of text from the limited number of characters you had at the beginning. I would replace them, but like a lot of college textbooks, they are expensive.