Chinese Short Stories for Beginners: 20 Captivating Stories to Learn Chinese & Grow Your Vocabulary the Fun Way! (Easy Chinese Stories)

This book is very good for learning Mandarin Chinese. Each story starts out with just the characters, which encourages the reader to stretch and try to remember what you have already learned. After reading the short story in the characters, then there is a version of the story that has each sentence in characters, Pinyin and English. Everything you need to fill in your knowledge gaps is right there. Then there is a summary, again in characters, Pinyin, and English. Following that there is a vocabulary list in characters/Pinyin/English. And after that there is a short, 5 question quiz based on the story. Followed by the answers to the quiz questions. It's a great way shore up your understanding, and add a few new characters to your vocabulary. I do think it works best with a fairly good foundation, but the method presented is very effective. And interesting.

Great little book and easy to read. I like the format with the Mandarin/Pinyin/English on one page. It makes it way easier to go back and forth as a beginner. Also really like the vocabulary list - gives a bit of direction as to what to focus on.

Great book for improving reading comprehension in Chinese and also vocabulary. It has a section after each story with questions regarding the story and also a section with vocabulary from the story.

Let's face it. Chinese is often taught in a dry manner with lots of rote-learning and memorization. Exercises filled with absurd sentences that have little value in the real world, which don't help you with fluency or understanding real people.The entire Lingo Mastery series is different. The stories in this book are real life tales that if you go to Taiwan, China, Singapore, or other places where Chinese is spoken, you will find this is what life is like there. You will learn from the very first story of a boy named "Johnson" who is attending a school for foreign kids in Singapore, getting immersed in both Chinese and Spanish with his classmates George, Isabella, Emma and David. This is a real story about real kids.Is it demanding work? Yes. Learning any language takes time and dedication. Is this book going to help? Absolutely, if you put in the work. Pair it with a good online dictionary (I recommend "Pleco") and some way to practice listening to native speakers use the language (native speaking friend, applications like Rosetta Stone or Duo Lingo, grocery shopping at an Chinese Market, etc) and you'll be well on your way to learning better Chinese.

I took Chinese over 10 years ago, and I’m now so rusty! But this book really got me into shape. Stories and dialogues are really the best way to acquire vocabulary (in context) and this book boosted my progress and memorization. I felt very ready for my exam and did well!

It is a nice book with many short stories. But can you imagine the pinyin part of it not right on top of each characters? The whole purpose of pinyin is to help you learn and read each character. It is not another language that can be presented in a separate paragraph like English or German. Presenting it like this makes this book useless for those looking for a pinyin matched book. Basically you can consider this book as if it does not come with any pinyin. Definitely not for beginners, even inconvenient to read for a native speaker like me!It’s also funny that when I tried to return it Amazon does not let me, so I’m stuck with this book and had to read it a bit more. At second glance, I would say this book at least has fluent English and Chinese, with no machine translation traces so if you are already an intermediate reader of both languages it can serve as a good language example. Maybe for those who wants to test if they can recognize just occasional new characters they could take the time to dig out the specific word in the super long pinyin chain and test themselves, but again not for beginners like those who need to learn most characters to read these.

There is one, to me, a very serious problem with this book. It states in the description (and on the back of the book) "Using Chinese characters, Pinyin romanization AND an English translation in each chapter, you will develop a fluent understanding of Chinese writing!". Its the words "an English translation". Its not THE English translation. Its an English summary of whats been written. That's no help at all and even makes it more confusing.IF the English words/translation matched the Pinyin so learners could understand the extremely important sentence structure, then it would be a real help. Occassionally a bold word in Pinyin is matched with a bold word in English which kind of gives you a marker of where you are in the sentence, but it only takes a few minutes to realize that the location of words in the Pinyin sentence does not match the location of the words in the English sentence. So... if you are trying to match words to learn how to speak in Chinese, then, NO. You may learn some words but not how they string together. For example, the word "not" or "no" is often the last word at the end of a Chinese sentence but could be anywhere in an English sentence. No thanks instead of thanks, no.

I really enjoyed the first book Chinese Short Stories for Beginners. It was a great way to study Chinese characters and reinforce what I learned in the Defense Language Institute years ago. The combination of characters, pinyin, and a good story made the content more memorable. I love how they space the pinyin out the same way the characters are combined when spoken (i.e., nimen as a unit, not separated ni men). I believe having a story with the characters makes the Chinese easier to remember than just using flash cards. The questions at the end of each story are also a good way to test your reading comprehension. So, when the second book came out, Chinese Short Stories for Beginners, it was good to have fresh content for my study. This book will not disappoint the student of the Chinese language.

The Chinese language is tricky in all aspects, especially in finding meaning behind the hieroglyphs.. not to mention the whole sentences! It’s unreal to read newspapers, Chinese websites (well pretty much everything 🙈) as a beginner student of Chinese… so this book is something that will help you to start deciphering the meaning of not just single hieroglyphs, but make sense of whole sentences. Each text has a vocabulary list of highlighted words from the text - tricky words that the beginner probably doesn’t know yet - so it is quite handy.

Consiglio di acquistarlo quando si ha già un livello tra l’intermedio e il principiante

Very, very good. My Chinese still isn't great but it seems that it's not as bad as I had thought. After reading a couple of these stories I feel encouraged to persevere with learning Chinese. Many thanks.

It was very useful to have the English translation as well as the Pinyin version.

I have been studying Mandarin for several years, using all the traditional text books and workbooks. I wanted to become more conversational so my tutor and I started using the Chinese Short Stories for Beginners to practice reading and having conversations about the content. We see new vocabulary, and my tutor points out common grammar usage within the stories.For anyone learning a language the books created by Oscar and his team from Lingo Mastery are a great purchase.Ed