I've often heard that the best way to learn any language is to spend a lot of time reading the language, particularly books. I really think that's true. So, given my interest in learning Mandarin (Chinese), I wanted to spend more time reading the language.
Now the challenge is always that until you know enough language, it's hard to read books at all, and if you have to keep looking up all the words, that gets painful pretty quickly too. I've heard that ideally, you want to already know about 90% of the words. You want to already know almost all of the common words and need to look up the words that are harder for you.
Now the problem with that is that most books that I could read like that were designed for children, and it's hard to keep your interest going when you're just reading children's books.
So, I was really excited to come across a series of graded readers for Mandarin. The first book I read was Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Curly Haired Company: Mandarin Companion Graded Readers Level 1 (Chinese Edition) by Renjun Yang (Adapter), Arthur Conan Doyle (Author), John Pasden (Editor).
Mandarin Companion Graded Readers
I was already familiar with John through his previous work on ChinesePod.com. I gather he's been the driving force in these readers. The description of the concept is as follows:
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.
Level 1 is intended for Chinese learners at an upper-elementary level. Most learners will be able to approach this book after one to two years of formal study, depending on the learner and program. This series is designed to combine simplicity of characters with an easy-to-understand storyline which helps learners to expand their vocabularies and language comprehension abilities. The more they read, the better they will become at reading and grasping the Chinese language.
For those who can read some Chinese, this typical page should give you an idea of the level that the book uses:
This book is an adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes story. In the book, Holmes is called "Gao Ming" (or Tall & Clever). I was surprised how much fun the book was, and how they managed to keep the twists and turns in the plot.
Bottom line?
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Although I found it a bit repetitive and simplistic in places, I'd say that the level was perfect for me. I just had a few words here and there that I needed to look up, and, very conveniently, in the Kindle version, they've highlighted words they suspect you might not know, and you just click them to go to a definition, and you can return directly to where you were reading. I'll be reading more of these.
Greg's rating: 9 out of 10