The Misadventures of Zhou Haisheng: Mandarin Companion Graded Readers Breakthrough Level, Traditional Chinese Edition

Description

***Traditional Chinese Editions*** Zhou Haisheng is a fun-loving and determined young boy whose life revolves around school and his family's Chinese restaurant. Always well-intentioned, he finds ways to help out his hard-working parents with the family business. Whether it's inventing his own noodle recipe, delivering the wrong order to a customer, or resorting to extremes when a competing noodle shop opens across the street, Zhou Haisheng manages to combine his mischief and wit to save the day. Mandarin Companion is a series of easy-to-read novels in Chinese that are fun to read and proven to accelerate language learning. Every book in the Mandarin Companion series is carefully written to use characters, words, and grammar that a learner is likely to know. The Breakthrough Level is written using only 150 unique Chinese characters and is intended for Chinese learners who have obtained a low elementary or novice level of Chinese. Most learners will be able to approach this book after one year of traditional formal study, depending on the learner and program. This level is designed to help learners begin to read full-length texts in Chinese and combines simplicity of characters with an easy-to-understand storyline that helps beginners grow their vocabulary and language comprehension abilities. Review: Needs more grammar help and a full vocabulary list at end of book. - "Breakthrough Level, Traditional Character Edition. 5 Stories" First of all, THANK YOU for publishing a traditional character edition, the best way in my view to read Chinese. Simplified characters are easy if you know traditional characters and traditional characters are far more beautiful and understandable, even if a few are hard to write. Despite what I say below, these books are all worth reading and are delightful stories. I read all five of the "Breakthrough Level" Chinese readers published by this company. While these books are at the most beginning stage for this series, they are not easy reading. There are words not explained and not in HSK 1. You need help in looking up these characters, if you don't know them. The writers used their own approach to a beginner's vocabulary. Fortunately, the same writers wrote all five books, so their vocabulary is the same throughout. The books get a little easier as you go through them. Best to read each story several times and make flash cards of important vocabulary. There is a grammar section at the back of each book, but it only mentions the point; it does not explain how it works. That is a serious omission for anyone wanting to read and learn on their own. Without that explanation, many sentences are obscure. The Wikipedia article "Chinese Grammar" I found useful. Otherwise, goggle "simple Chinese grammar." Clearly these stories are meant for the classroom, not for the self-taught. There is no list of all the vocabulary in the back or an English translation. They do offer translations of certain words in the text, but again, their way of selecting words to translate is not clear. If you need something easier to get you started, I liked Twenty Three Cats by Jeff Pepper, which uses 101 words from the HSK 1 list (available on desertcart) or download the free Pleco app and look under add-ons.