Glad to hear you find the site useful! Yeah, there really isn’t much carefully controlled content at the level you describe. I think the problem is that there’s only one way to be a beginner, but countless ways of being an intermediate learner. It’s hard to develop something that fits most or even many intermediate learners. When we write the games over at WordSwing, we often have this difficulty level in mind, but we don’t control vocabulary super carefully either (but we do our best!).

I am happy with the last year of learning Mandarin. I’ve found that consistency makes a big difference, even if every new step itself is a small one. My reading has improved quite a bit – so far, most of what I have read was within the range of my developing vocab (roughly HSK 4 plus). Just started a Chinese Breeze reader at the 1100 (word? character?) level but that turned out to be quite difficult – quite a big step-up from the previous level, even if the numbers suggest otherwise. It would be great to have graded readers which build on and go beyond HSK 4 but somehow only use a well defined additional set of vocabulary.