Short Stories in Chinese: New Penguin Parallel Text

I am Chinese and bilingual (English/Mandarin) and I like this book and the approach Penguin has taken for this Parallel Text series. I bought this book to read the short stories in Chinese. I wasn't sure if the English would help (unless there was a literary "flowery" sentence I couldn't understand). In the end, however, I found myself reading the Chinese version and completely ignoring the English version because (1) the English translation deliberately skips some sentences, so you don't get the full picture (caveat emptor!) and (2) the English translation is not as beautiful and full of meaning as the equivalent Chinese expression. I did not notice any Chinese grammatical errors at all. How would that be possible, since the Chinese version is the original text written by the authors? I did suspect, a couple of times, that the Chinese original text had been edited or cut in some mysterious way, but it wasn't enough to derail my reading experience. This book has helped me discover some good contemporary writers I otherwise would not have noticed.

Reading outside your own culture is highly recommended. Observing the links and the differences is half the enjoyment, the rest is from the startling originality that comes from freedom from familiar tropes and cliches.Of course there is a downside, a couple of the tales, Dog and Plow-Ox, (there was likely animal symbolism I missed) seemed directionless and a bit random. The Mistake and The Ancestor were compelling and powerful. Overall the collection is a relatively quick read of well chosen short tales.

My wife (who speaks Mandarin natively) read this and tells me that the Mandarin text is packed with grammatical errors, to the point where it was difficult to read. Apparently not a good reference. Disappointing.

I have read two stories so far. My Chinese is almost fluent but the stories here have so much local slang that I had to refer to the English constantly. The second story, "The Ancestor" was, to me, terrible. I have yet to read the remaining stories.

In response to the 1-star review, there are typos. In Ma Yuan's story, "The Mistake," (Old Fart Zhao) 赵老屁 is sometimes written 找老屁， and as the review noted, there are occasions where 的 is mistaken for 得, as serious as writing "it's" instead of "its."But.When using Pinyin typos sometimes happen. Does it matter? Yes. Knock a star off. But the errors are not so egregious, and we can still understand without much problem. Parallel texts are very useful when trying to learn languages. This book satisfies such a purpose.

As other reviewers have pointed out, there are quite a few typos in the Chinese versions of the stories collected in this book. I would guess these typos were probably introduced by the translator during some stage of the editing process. Most won’t seriously understanding for readers with strong or native Chinese reading skills, but they may still distract the reader from the literary beauty of the stories and detract from the quality of this parallel text as a resource for learning mandarin. Hopefully they can be corrected in a future edition. (As an aside, I can’t say I noticed any grammatical errors in the text, as mentioned by one other reviewer. Almost all the errors are of the kind caused my typing pinyin quickly and then not selecting the correct character from the drop down window, 即大部分就是错别字。）

I have read only the first few pages, but have identified some incorrect use of characters, notably on page 4 which contains at least three errors. In line 4 the Chinese word “lìlái” 历来 has been written incorrectly as the similarly pronounced 利来. In line 5, “biàn” 变makes no sense, and should probably be “piàn” 片. In line 9, the character 的 ( “de” ) in 把头发梳的乌亮 should be 得 (also pronounced “de”). Unless these errors occurred in the original, which seems unlikely, they may be the result of careless transcription of the text, as in each case the correct and incorrect characters sound identical or similar when pronounced. If so, it would be worth knowing how much of the book contains such errors. My rating is based just on my reading of the first few pages, but I resent such errors appearing in a text which would be used by many learners to improve their Chinese reading skills. This is a great pity as the first story is beautifully written. Perhaps a second edition will eliminate such errors?

Grammar mistakes exist in Chinese text; some translations are not accurate.

Ce livre permet de s'entraîner à lire des textes simples directement en hanzi. On a d'un côté le texte en mandarin et de l'autre le texte en anglais. La progression est variée. La principale difficulté ici sera de lire le texte et de le déchiffrer et à ce stade de compétence, le contenu ne devrait poser aucun souci. A réserver déjà à des personnes avec un bon niveau (HSK3), pas adapté pour les débutants.

There is no pinyin with chinese texts. Only suitable for advanced level.

Me gusta la selección de textos, pero la calidad del papel es bastante mala.Las traducciones no están mal, pero si el libro viviera acompañado de algún glosario sería más útil para estudiantes.

This is a fantastic book. I was learning Arabic and had a similar book to this in that language. With parallel English and Chinese writing this is perfect to assist any learning program. Only thing missing is a MP3 CD with the stories read in chinese which my arabic book had.Must for any student of Chinese. I love it!

アメリカのamazonでは中国語のテキストの文法上の間違いが指摘されているが、それ以前に英語訳に誤訳が多くて使い物にならない。翻訳者の能力不足か手抜きかはしらないがユーザーをなめた仕事だと思う　日本語版のパラレルテキストを気に入っていてこれにも期待していたがペンギンには失望させられた。