Bilingual news

I don't agree that "Parallel English and Chinese texts make it easier to learn words from context without dictionary lookup.", not necessarily. For me anyway this generally doesn't help, and there a few reasons for this : 1) bilingual stuff coming from China is geared to Chinese speakers to help them learn English, certainly the case of chinadaily.com and it shows. 2) the translation is useful when you're unclear about certain things, but it's too distracting and all too easy to read to then cursorily go over the Chinese thinking you got it. 3) I do think there is value in doing dictionary lookup, sometimes frustrating but no big effort with such tools s ChinesePera-kun 4) I guess it depends on your level but I like a broader choice of topics, getting the feel about the story from a picture / graphics and be able to choose longer, or much shorter articles. I personally read a few articles from the bbc news in Chinese, generally there's a corresponding article on the English side but often with a different focus. Just me I guess

I don't disagree with you, but there are times when you feel lazy and it's nice to read text without doing any dictionary lookups at all, even instantaneous ones. It's reading mode rather than learning mode. I wouldn't use this as a primary learning method, but sometimes it's nice for variety.

i like these bilingual sections, Great for elementary learners and above. they show the great efficiency of Mandarin. The BBC 中文 site is also very useful, although the news is biased there, it's all good exposure to the language.

leviathan, why do you say BBC news is biased? All news reports have a bias, even news agencies such as Reuters or AFP have a bias, if only in their choice of what to cover. When it comes to China, it becomes very obvious, but do you really think there is less bias on official news media or VOA? You just have to keep it mind with any news, know where they're speaking from 而已。 Not sure who is the audience for the BBC Chinese news but the tone is often very different even on the same reports, here's an example of cynicism that didn't make it to the Chinese side (about the bridge collapse in Hunan): '"China should learn a lesson from the collapse of the Mississippi bridge, and accelerate the inspection of unsafe bridges," [Xiao Rucheng] said, referring to the 1 August collapse of a bridge in the US that killed at least nine people. '