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We are pleased to announce all of the Mandarin Companion Level 1 books are now available as audiobooks on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes!

Over the years, we’ve had numerous emails from listeners asking for audio versions of the graded readers. We’ve constantly been focused on other projects at Mandarin Companion (such as our new podcast and Breakthrough Level, for instance), but last year we decided to finally tackle this one. It took longer than we anticipated, but it is done and now available!

Listening to the audio as you are reading a book can be a very helpful tool for learning a second language, especially Chinese! Every Chinese learner knows what it is like to come across a character you don’t know. In English, Spanish, German, Korean, Arabic, or virtually any other language, you could at least sound it out, but not in Chinese! An unknown character is like a black hole. Listening to audio while you are reading can help you to know how to pronounce unknown characters and reinforce the pronunciation of ones you already know or are still learning.

The speed of the narration is recorded at a slower pace of about 120 characters per minute, a target reading speed for second language learners. However, the platforms on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes all have speed controls that allow you to slow down, or even speed up, the speed of the audio to an appropriate rate for you! So if you are beginning reader, no problem! Just drop it down. If you are reading at a good speed and are trying to elevate it further, you can increase it up to as much as 2x! You have control.

Just a note, currently only the Level 1 books are available, but we will be producing the Breakthrough Level and our Level 2 books as audiobooks in the future. Here is a list and links to the audiobook titles available.

Audiobook Links

 

Thanks for listening! And if you are looking for more things to listen to, here is a short plug for our podcast, You Can Learn Chinese, and what one of the listeners had to say.

“So much more than just “talking about learning about” Chinese. Practical, learnable, and copyable advice for all levels of speakers. John and Jared really lay out some fascinating insights, and their guest interviews are fun and equally as interesting. A must-have podcast, I’ve been a subscriber since episode #1!” – by R. Smeith

Or this glowing review from Tanner H (汉天恩)

I have been following Jared Turner and John Pasden through Mandarin Companion – since 2016. Those books raised my reading ability, along with other resources, to a score a perfect reading score on HSK 3 while studying Chinese only part time, working full time in an English-speaking environment in China. Needless to say, I could not be more excited to see these guys collaborating on another platform. This podcast strikes such a helpful balance between practical and technical, educational, and experiential advice and inspiration to learn Chinese, no matter where you live in the world. The most valuable aspect of their perspectives is their combined 20+ years of experience as 2nd language Chinese learners. Give it a listen, and be prepared to be inspired to new heights in your learning!

You can find out all about it here.

Thanks!

Since John and I started Mandarin Companion back in 2012, we have pursued a vision of a revolution in learning Chinese marked by the advent of easy-to-read and interesting (key word interesting) books in Chinese. Few things have the impact on any language development as does reading and the mounting testimonials from readers is a testament to the impact it is making around the world.

As the years went on, we came to realize that for many learners it may take several years before they reach the point when they are able to read the Level 1, 300 character, stories. In discussion with many learners and teachers, they loved the concept of the books, but most needed something even easier to read. We also found that in Chinese programs all over the world, students tend to drop out after a year or two. A significant reason behind this has to do with the slow progress of learning Chinese in that it can take years before a learner feels like they can do anything with the language.

When John and I discussed these various issues, we decided that we need to do our part to help this generation of learners to read Chinese at an earlier stage, to help them get a “win” earlier, to make the goal of reading in Chinese even more obtainable. This was the genesis of the Breakthrough level.

The Breakthrough 150 Character Level Standard

When we started out, we knew we had to make it as simple as possible AND interesting, two things that are at odds with each other. We floated out different numbers of characters until we settled on only 150 and, at the time, we weren’t even sure if we were going to be able to write anything good with that little!

We had to set some strict rules for this level because otherwise it can be too easy to compromise your standards for the sake of the story. Once you begin adding a harder character, it becomes easier to add one more, and then one more, and before you know it your book is filled with words and characters that slow down a reader, tripping them up every paragraph. We all know it’s hard enough to read at these early stages!

In this new level, you’ll only find the most useful and common characters and words. For example, all of the 150 characters in the Breakthrough Level are a subset of the Level 1 standard. On top of that, all of the key words in the Breakthrough standard fall within the 300 characters in the Level 1 standard. That means you’ll never waste time learning characters that are not important to your fluency at this stage of Chinese.

Breakthrough Titles

We will be releasing five Breakthrough Level books by mid 2019. We found that due to our constraints it was nearly impossible to adapt existing stories so we wrote our own! All of these are original stories written by John and myself. Here is a preview of the upcoming books.

• My Teacher is a Martian 《我的老师是火星人》- Two good friends notice their teacher is very strange, so strange that they begin to suspect that he is actually from Mars.
• Xiao Ming, Boy Sherlock《小明》- Xiao Ming would one day grow up to be a great detective, but it all started when he was just a boy.
• In Search of Hua Ma《花马》- All he wanted to do was give his mother a simple present, instead a son finds himself transported across China on bizarre quest…
• Three Friends《三个朋友》- Two guys have been friends forever, but what happens when they fall for the same girl in college?

First Release: The Misadventures of Zhou Haisheng

The Misadventures of Zhou Haisheng is the first book in the Breakthrough Level. It follows the antics of 9 year-old Zhou Haisheng whose parents own a small noodle shop. Always well-intentioned, he finds ways to help out his hard-working parents with the family business. Whether its 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, Haisheng manages to combine his mischief and wit to save the day. Here is a small sample.

“我爸爸妈妈出去了，我不会做菜₁。你们晚上₂再来吧。”海生对那那几个人说。

“那你们吃的是什么？”一个男人一边₃笑₄一边₃问。

“面，他做的。”海生的朋友说。

“好吃吗？”男人又₅问。

“很好吃。”海生的朋友开心₆地说。

几个男人又₅笑₄了：“好，那我们今天也吃面。去做吧。”

1. 做菜 (zuòcài) vo. to cook food
2. 晚上 (wǎnshang) n. evening
3. 一边 (yībiān) conj. while doing… (two things)
4. 笑 (xiào) v. to laugh, to smile
5. 又 (yòu) adv. again
6. 开心 (kāixīn) adj. happy

When you get to the Mandarin Companion Level 2 books, don’t forget about this story! You’ll see how they all fit in.

Get your copy today on Amazon or Kobo! And if you are a teacher or administrator looking to place an order for your school, contact us directly.
If you want to be the first to know about the new releases, subscribe to our email list below.

#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */

We are ever grateful for all of the support from all of our readers. We’ll be releasing even more titles this year and be sure to have a listen to our podcast. 加油！

Since John and I started Mandarin Companion back in 2012, we have pursued a vision of a revolution in learning Chinese marked by the advent of easy-to-read and interesting (key word interesting) books in Chinese. Few things have the impact on any language development as does reading and the mounting testimonials from readers is a testament to the impact it is making around the world.

As the years went on, we came to realize that for many learners it may take several years before they reach the point when they are able to read the Level 1, 300 character, stories. In discussion with many learners and teachers, they loved the concept of the books, but most needed something even easier to read. We also found that in Chinese programs all over the world, students tend to drop out after a year or two. A significant reason behind this has to do with the slow progress of learning Chinese in that it can take years before a learner feels like they can do anything with the language.

When John and I discussed these various issues, we decided that we need to do our part to help this generation of learners to read Chinese at an earlier stage, to help them get a “win” earlier, to make the goal of reading in Chinese even more obtainable. This was the genesis of the Breakthrough level.

The Breakthrough 150 Character Level Standard

When we started out, we knew we had to make it as simple as possible AND interesting, two things that are at odds with each other. We floated out different numbers of characters until we settled on only 150 and, at the time, we weren’t even sure if we were going to be able to write anything good with that little!

We had to set some strict rules for this level because otherwise it can be too easy to compromise your standards for the sake of the story. Once you begin adding a harder character, it becomes easier to add one more, and then one more, and before you know it your book is filled with words and characters that slow down a reader, tripping them up every paragraph. We all know it’s hard enough to read at these early stages!

In this new level, you’ll only find the most useful and common characters and words. For example, all of the 150 characters in the Breakthrough Level are a subset of the Level 1 standard. On top of that, all of the key words in the Breakthrough standard fall within the 300 characters in the Level 1 standard. That means you’ll never waste time learning characters that are not important to your fluency at this stage of Chinese.

Breakthrough Titles

We will be releasing five Breakthrough Level books by mid 2019. We found that due to our constraints it was nearly impossible to adapt existing stories so we wrote our own! All of these are original stories written by John and myself. Here is a preview of the upcoming books.

• My Teacher is a Martian 《我的老师是火星人》- Two good friends notice their teacher is very strange, so strange that they begin to suspect that he is actually from Mars.
• Xiao Ming, Boy Sherlock《小明》- Xiao Ming would one day grow up to be a great detective, but it all started when he was just a boy.
• In Search of Hua Ma《花马》- All he wanted to do was give his mother a simple present, instead a son finds himself transported across China on bizarre quest…
• Three Friends《三个朋友》- Two guys have been friends forever, but what happens when they fall for the same girl in college?

First Release: The Misadventures of Zhou Haisheng

The Misadventures of Zhou Haisheng is the first book in the Breakthrough Level. It follows the antics of 9 year-old Zhou Haisheng whose parents own a small noodle shop. Always well-intentioned, he finds ways to help out his hard-working parents with the family business. Whether its 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, Haisheng manages to combine his mischief and wit to save the day. Here is a small sample.

“我爸爸妈妈出去了，我不会做菜₁。你们晚上₂再来吧。”海生对那那几个人说。

“那你们吃的是什么？”一个男人一边₃笑₄一边₃问。

“面，他做的。”海生的朋友说。

“好吃吗？”男人又₅问。

“很好吃。”海生的朋友开心₆地说。

几个男人又₅笑₄了：“好，那我们今天也吃面。去做吧。”

1. 做菜 (zuòcài) vo. to cook food
2. 晚上 (wǎnshang) n. evening
3. 一边 (yībiān) conj. while doing… (two things)
4. 笑 (xiào) v. to laugh, to smile
5. 又 (yòu) adv. again
6. 开心 (kāixīn) adj. happy

When you get to the Mandarin Companion Level 2 books, don’t forget about this story! You’ll see how they all fit in.

Get your copy today on Amazon or Kobo! And if you are a teacher or administrator looking to place an order for your school, contact us directly.
If you want to be the first to know about the new releases, subscribe to our email list below.

#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */

We are ever grateful for all of the support from all of our readers. We’ll be releasing even more titles this year and be sure to have a listen to our podcast. 加油！

For the Chinese version/中文版: 如何通过AP汉语考试：一个拥有高合格率老师的秘诀

My students call me 柏老师, however you can call me Grant Brown. I am a Chinese language high school teacher from Iowa. Over a period of a couple of years, I was able to take my students studying Chinese from a 50% pass rate to a 100% pass rate on the AP Chinese exam. This is what I did.

The Story

I have been teaching Chinese in high school for several years. When I was in college, I started studying Chinese and gained such a love for the language that I went on to obtain a masters degree in Chinese and lived in Guangzhou, China, for a number of years. There are not many of us Americans who teach Chinese, however I think we are able to bring a unique perspective to the classroom.

When I first started teaching Chinese, we mostly followed the textbook. I thought I was doing a good job in covering the content of the textbook, but the only the students who had grown up in Chinese speaking households were the ones passing the test. We steadily worked through the Chinese textbooks and progressed towards more advanced material, yet my student’s ability to understand and produce Chinese in terms of speaking and writing was quite weak.

Every day we would cover new grammar patterns, add new characters, and continue onto the next lesson in the textbook. The students would take the test, they would do all right, and then we’d move onto the next chapter but would seemingly forget everything they learned. It was really unsatisfying for the student and for me as a teacher. They knew they were not getting better at Chinese, I knew they were not getting better at Chinese, but nobody knew what to do and we were sort of stuck in this cycle. I found that it is totally possible as a Chinese student to have a core set of vocabulary and grammar and yet be unable to use the language.

I began asking myself “What do I do? Do the last few assessments count for anything? Do I go back to the beginning? Do I admit defeat?”

Taking the AP Chinese Exam

I learned in graduate school that, in theory, reading speed and task analysis are some of the biggest indicators of success on exams; Can the student read quickly enough within the time frame and not get tired? Can the student understand what they are supposed to do? Later on, I had the opportunity to be a reader for the AP Chinese exam, and that experience confirmed those theories.

The AP Chinese exam takes 2 hours and 15 minutes to complete and is comprised of two sections. One half contains 70 multiple choice questions, half based on reading prompts and half based on listening prompts. The other half, students are required to complete two writing tasks and listen and respond orally to prompts. Additionally, the student is expected to have some knowledge of Chinese culture and customs to be reflected in the writing and responses. The AP Chinese exam is a strong gauge of a students ability to grasp and understand Chinese.

People who study foreign language assessment understand that reading slowly is an enormous source of error for scoring well on tests. The slower the person reads, the more difficult it is for them to remember all of the things that are involved in a particular text. They’re not able to process the text as deeply. They’re not able to employ their full set of cognitive resources. Reading speed is just like the bandwidth on your internet connection. If you limit that bandwidth, you can either understand what is going on, remember what is going on, or think about what is going on, but you can’t do all three. And if you are reading too slow, you likely can only do one of the three which is going to be a basic understanding. Reading speed and reading comprehension go hand in hand.

This underscores one of the greatest problems of traditional language education, especially for Chinese. Everyone knows that Chinese is slower to learn than other languages, but frequently fail to stop to think about what does it mean for the pace of language learning to be slower. Typically, students are introduced to a wave of new words and characters which they may not see again for months or even years. Textbooks are excellent at introducing material but do a poor job of recycling material just learned. They are also poor at creating opportunities to use basic and intermediate words all together. Because of this, learners often have the experience of working through a textbook chapter learning things they need to say, discarding them, and then moving onto the next chapter. This is often why a student may be able to study up to an intermediate level of Chinese but lack an intermediate level of proficiency.

The Day Everything Changed

Everything changed the day I brought graded readers into the classroom. When I was studying for my masters degree in Chinese, one of my professors was a big advocate of extensive reading. Having easy-to-read books is so important because after the initial excitement of learning has passed, students get to a point where they say “now I want to use my language” and they just can’t. Graded readers are one of those very few things that learners are able to use with relative ease and have such a profound impact on their ability to use Chinese.

At the beginning, we read one book all together as a class. We went through it slowly and deliberately with a guided reading approach. I was able to help when we came across characters that students had forgotten or didn’t know. As we read together, I would find out what was understood and then break it down in a structured way.

After the process of having read one book in this way, students were then able to choose their own book and read it in pairs or groups. Because they had already read one book, students developed confidence to read on their own. We would read for the first 15 mins of class three to four days per week and then move onto the lesson for that day.

Some students struggled and felt they were never going to get through a book, but with some help and encouragement, they continued to read. After a while, they were able to take a look back and realize just how much they had actually read. Once when I had a student go back to the book he had first started reading, in his excitement he blurted out “Man, this is so easy!” Yeah it was easy, because now you’ve learned how to do this! They didn’t just struggle through a few sample sentences or short paragraphs, they had been practicing all of the vocabulary and grammar in new and novel forms in a variety of different contexts, a way that mirrors the way we actually encounter language in the real world. And now that they had this practice, they were able to comprehend and use Chinese in a way they hadn’t been able to do before.

Once students had read a second book, the experience became easier and much more enjoyable for everyone involved. I would assign books as homework but we would still occasionally have reading time in class. Those students who read through all of the graded readers up to level 2 were able to jump off to reading comic books or whatever else they were interested in. Some of this was slow, but because they found it interesting and had a solid grasp of Chinese, they found it worthwhile and it gave them opportunities to develop their language skills further even if it required extra work.

Why Graded Readers Work

Prior to using graded readers in the classroom, it’s not as if I wasn’t teaching reading, I was! We had the students reading things in the textbook and I created plenty of additional readings. We had the students using all of the supplemental materials, but it just wasn’t enough.

Specifically, the Mandarin Companion graded readers provide a chance for students to see words and characters they’ve learned over and over again. This is so important especially with certain challenging elements of Chinese like the verb 着 (zhe) structures. I can’t tell you how much time I must have spent, year after year, trying to teach students how to use 着. I have created charts, explained it with charts, sample sentences, and prompts and then have the students try to use it. They would have a loose understanding of what it meant but no one was ever able to use it correctly. Then maybe two weeks later we would see it in a sample reading from the textbook and they would ask about this weird grammar structure using the character 着. I would be like, yeah, that’s 着, the character we went over with all those charts and graphs.

However, when we started reading in the Mandarin Companion stories, they would start seeing 着 over and over again along with all of these different grammar structures, but this time it was being used in meaningful ways that impacted their understanding of the story. When they were able to finally experience it used in this way, this and other grammar forms became comprehensible to them. Not only did they remember 着, but they also began to use it in their own writing!

Character recognition is the tail that wags the dog for all Chinese education. As I’ve attended countless workshops and presentations at Chinese conferences around the world, educators are constantly trying to find ways to teach characters in a way that doesn’t take up so much time, isn’t boring, and doesn’t make students feel unhappy. While the jury is out on exactly what is the best way to do this, what I do know is once a student understands enough Chinese to start reading extensively, learning new characters just becomes easy and learners have a great time doing it. There is still a little bit of explicit character study, but for the most part, they get on this implicit learning train that is just constantly picking up new things all the time. The sooner we can get students onto that train, the fewer students will be lost in the grind of character memorization.

Building Reading Stamina for Test Taking

If you can imagine for a moment sitting down for two hours to take AP Chinese exam and lets suppose you have a good knowledge of all of the material, but you’ve only ever sat down to study in 20 min chunks where you move from one activity to the next and you’ve never sat down and done a straight 1 or 2 hours of a single activity in Chinese before. This illustrates the contrast of the classroom vs test taking experience. You’d imagine that 1) you’re going to be exhausted by the time you get to the end of the lengthy exam, and 2) the harder you struggle to keep pace at the beginning of the exam the harder it will be to perform well throughout the entire test. Reading stamina in a foreign language is a very real skill.

To help students build reading stamina, we created tracking sheets that tracked reading in terms of pages per 15 mins and how long they are able to sit down and read in Chinese before they felt fatigued. I wanted to help them build their capacity to read longer periods of time without feeling exhausted. Slowly over the course of time, the amount of time they spent being able to read on their own without stopping, consistently increased. For students who really bought into the process, sitting down and reading for 30-45 mins became very approachable.

In Class Activities

Building the class around extensive reading is an amazing opportunity for students to have this huge amount of comprehensible input while at the same time getting high quality practice in Chinese. When you have this going on, you can take a step back and add some listening, speaking, and writing activities. When the students get invested in a story, the opportunities are endless. Here are some of the things we did in class.

• Stage a debate about what the main character should have done differently.
• Some students produced their own podcast for the class where they discussed a book.
• Produced a radio play using a scene from a story with students playing different characters.
• Two students wrote an entire story about Xiao Hei 小黑, the dog from the story The Sixty Year Dream, complete with illustrations.
• In a more memorable experience, the class staged a press conference with the main character from The Country of the Blind after he escaped the country. With one student playing the main character, the others acted like news reporters and interviewed him about his experience.

With activities like these, students are not worrying so much about what to say, they know what to say, they’re just thinking about how to say it. It provides an environment with endless possibilities that pushes the limit on what they are able to do with the language.

Cultural Elements in Graded Readers

I remember one time when talking to a fellow Chinese teacher who said “These books are interesting, but I really want my students to read things that have a lot of Chinese cultural information in it.” What she didn’t realize is that all of the book in Mandarin Companion are set in China during various time periods that are totally filled with opportunities to hook students on different elements of Chinese culture. I was able to give students reading and writing projects based on the stories that extended their interests into other domains. For instance, after reading The Monkeys Paw they may become interested in finding more about the period of the opening up of China in the 80’s (开展开发), or after reading The Sixty Year Dream they become interested in the fall of the Qing dynasty, or even during reading Great Expectations they’re more interested in finding out about Yunan. All the stories provide hooks for the students to become interested in more real-world things on their own without the help of a teacher.

Having books like these are so much more interesting to students because it gives a teacher like me incredible latitude to ask things like “Would you like to know more about this?” When you have the learners buy in, all of a sudden you have students who are really willing to put that extra effort into finding out more about the world around them. They spur interest in Chinese culture and customs. It creates opportunities for students to deepen their interest and enjoyment in a Chinese learning experience, leading them to attempt more challenging tasks with greater interest, tasks that lead to bigger and better outcomes. I believe finding the right reading material for students is the fundamental challenge of a Chinese teacher.

100% Pass Rate

As a class, we achieved a 100% pass rate on the AP Chinese exam with an average score of 4. Every single student was doing extensive reading. The students who really bought into extensive reading had strong results with scores of 4 and 5. And just to be clear, every student in my Chinese class took the exam, so it wasn’t just 100% of the test takers, it was all of the kids in the class who passed. As a teacher, this was the best gift I could have ever hoped for, to see my students succeed.

But there is life after the AP Chinese exam. From this class of students, 50% went on to study Chinese at university. Typically students attending university who had previously studied in high school will place into a Chinese 100 level class with some testing into Chinese 200. For my students, most placed into Chinese 200 level classes with some even placing into Chinese 300. Extensive reading simply generates superior results.

A NOTE FOR TEACHERS

The big challenge for all Chinese teachers is keeping kids in their program. Every Chinese teacher knows this. As a body of professionals, we often get complacent when we start dealing with our intermediate students. It’s easy to assume that students are going to stay in the program, but that’s not necessarily the case; Intermediate students leave programs all the time. If we are not able to provide experiences of success, proof of improvement, and experiences that are enjoyable and rewarding, then yeah, they’re going to leave. We have to find ways to keep our intermediate and advanced students in the programs and we need to do it by giving them a chance to really practice and learn Chinese.

This underscores how easy it is to overlook this ‘time problem’ of Chinese. If you are a Spanish student and you study really hard, in 2 years you’re going to have the ability to a lot of fun things with your Spanish. However, Chinese is just so much more challenging and if we don’t find ways to make Chinese fun, entertaining, and enjoyable, then many people just stop studying. Even great students stop for all sorts of reasons; perhaps it’s taking too much time, they feel like they’re not making enough progress, or they feel like they’re never going to be able to use their Chinese for something enjoyable.

Superior Results

When I think back to the time before I used graded readers, I was sold on following the Integrated Chinese textbook, mainly because this is the textbook most University programs use. I figured if they were going to study Chinese in college, this would give them a head start and possibly skip forward a couple years in college. I discovered that taking a step away from the textbook, spending more time with extensive reading, and requiring students to do more writing was better preparation for university than any lesson in any book. It provided a more robust experience for the learner in many ways. For example, if you were to give one of my students a grammar test, perhaps they would not necessarily perform as well as some other students who had followed the textbook in a strict sense, however, in terms of their grasp and command of the language, it’s totally different. No amount of review and no number of discussions about the perils of the forgetting curve was as effective in helping students to retain vocabulary or build proficiency in Chinese as extensive reading.

Extensive reading provides the scaffold to help learners through the awkward intermediate stages and gives students the confidence that they can actually use the language, understand the language, and open up the language to their view. Even more, when they actually do encounter Chinese people, they have more things to talk about because they’ve been exposed to the culture through reading.

Ultimately, it is up to us as learners and educators alike to take responsibility for the language learning experience and transform it from obtaining an intermediate knowledge about Chinese into having an intermediate level of ability in Chinese. You can do it!

Due to the interest this article has received, you can find out more about how to do extensive reading through the Extensive Reading Foundations “Guide to Extensive Reading” and the why of extensive reading through this easy-to-digest video “The Inescapable Case for Extensive Reading” .

We are excited to share the inspiring story of Jonathan Coveney! His story is one of a kind. Drop us a note if you want to share your story! – Jared

I grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas…a stark contrast to my adult life. My father is a network engineer, my mother worked in non-profits, and that combined with my younger sister and I make our family of 4. Although my mother is Venezuelan, I never learned Spanish because I rebelled at the age of 4, an opportunity I felt I missed!

After studying Business and Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania, I spent a year in Uruguay living with relatives. That year was very formational for me…I had studied Spanish for a long time but in a very halfhearted way as I had always felt that Spanish was a birth-right that had been denied to me…and I guess I felt ashamed about it. However, being there forced me to get over that and just dive into the language, something that helped me lay the groundwork for tackling Mandarin. After my time in Uruguay, which was beautiful, difficult, challenging and transformational, I went off to join the work force!

I’ve since worked and moved around among a number of companies. My first job was at Credit Suisse, went to comScore as a data analyst, got a job at Twitter, then my quarter life crisis found me working for Spotify in Sweden, then back to Twitter in San Francisco, then a relationship with a Chinese American woman (FORESHADOWING) led me New York also working for Twitter, then for the hedge fund Two Sigma, next onto Stripe where many of my friends from Twitter had gone to, and then onto Google, after which I up and moved to China! I guess by personality I just sort of…I do things 100% or 0%. It’s a blessing and a curse. I’m bad at balance. But when I focus, I just can’t do something half-heartedly.

I started learning because of my ex-girlfriend who I moved to New York to be with. She is a New Yorker through and through, but grew up in China till the age of 5. Although her mom could speak fairly basic English, her dad didn’t. We would go to her parent’s house fairly regularly for meals, but my girlfriend was not inclined to translate what they said. Usually after some long-heated exchange between her and her parents, I’d ask what they said and she would say, “oh, nothing, nothing important.” Me and that girlfriend were fairly serious, so I wanted to be able to have my own relationship with her parents. My father never learned Spanish, and after having learned Spanish as an adult and finally being able to have my own relationship with my maternal extended family, I basically resolved I would never have such important people in my life that I couldn’t talk to. It always saddens me to think that my father has extended family through my mother for over 35 years that he doesn’t know. Although at times they have lived in close proximity, he just does not know them. I’ve oft times reflected on my grandfather from my mother’s side who was sort of the patriarch of the family. We never had much of a close relationship as a child because I didn’t speak Spanish. He has since passed away and while I lived with relatives in Uruguay learning Spanish, I heard all of these stories about his sense of humor, his good, his bad, and I resolved to never let that happen again.

My girlfriends’ parents were very touched that they were a big reason for me learning Chinese and were always very, very nice to me! While this was a major motivating factor, there were also many others that provided me with the fuel to study. Perhaps an understated factor at that time was the fact that I currently didn’t have any big obsession! Work was steady but frustrating and I wanted an intellectual outlet I could pour myself into. I had also made many Chinese-American friends in college and had many Chinese coworkers at my job.

My apartment in New York at the time had a pretty big living room and you could usually find me on the couch, studying while my girlfriend would work on her various crafts. I had been studying a textbook and flashcards for maybe 8-9 months

At this time, I was feeling a bit burnt out on Chinese…I was sticking with it, but I had been studying with a textbook and flashcards for about 9 months, however I would frequently study 30-40 hours per week on top of my full-time job. You could say I had really gotten “into” studying Chinese. I was using flashcard programs to study a boatload of lists with random vocab. I would use the Chinese Text Analyzer to add vocab from novels I wanted to read. I made a lot of mistakes and I spent a LOT of time doing data entry in Anki. A LOT of time.

However, I felt like I would never be able to read anything of value. The characters are a huge challenge and, as someone who loves reading, it felt really sad that it would take so long to read anything worth reading. One day I was reading an article that mentioned the Mandarin Companion series while I was looking for graded readers in Chinese. My first impression, if I’m being honest, was “Dear god I hope these are better than Chinese Breeze!” Graded readers seemed to fill in a nice niche, and as I looked more into Mandarin Companion, it felt like…graded readers done right. Graded readers done by someone who cared about making them fun and interesting and compelling. Someone who didn’t just want to make a study tool, but making something someone would actually want to read!

That night I decided I would try and read Great Expectations. I started reading…and I felt something entirely familiar and yet entirely new: I was hooked. I love to read and that familiar call was alluring me to abandon myself to a new story, yet this feeling was different because I had never felt it before in Chinese. And yet as the story unfolded, I found myself caring…caring in a way I hadn’t had the chance to care about Chinese before. I had never read Great Expectations in English and even though it has been the source of inspiration for thousands of tropes that have been riffed in countless stories in popular culture, it gave the story a timeless appeal, an experience that became all my own.

I don’t want to spoil the story, of course, but through the ups and downs of following Pip 小毛 through his life, I found myself emotionally engaged and connected. This is perhaps where the presence of my girlfriend matters, as she was used to me studying in peace on the sofa, but she was not use to me getting increasingly excited when I would continue blurting out “I’m reading! This story is good!”

I finished parts 1 and 2 that night, staying up far past my normal bed-time. It’d been a long time since I had done that in any language, and it felt so amazing to tap into that universal joy of reading in this language I was putting so much blood and sweat into learning.

During the most dramatic moments, I found myself on the verge of tears. Partly because it is just a really great story, but it was also because I was moved by this new experience in Chinese! I felt like a child filled with the wonder of learning a new language; this wonder that gives you a chance to explore yourself in an entirely new context. You’re still you, but your experiences, your identity, all have to be constructed and retold using new words, new phrases, and new cultural references. Many people say they feel like a different person in each language they speak, but that night, I was filled with joy knowing that whoever I was in Chinese, I would also be a reader.

When I finished reading Great Expectations, I had this feeling of a whole new world unfolding to me. I felt like I could cry. The simple fact that I could read something in Chinese and that I didn’t have to wait 5 years and 5000 characters to get there AND actually be moved by it filled me with such intense joy! I was completely overwhelmed!

A short while after this, I decided to take a break from the grind of character memorization. Grinding so much flash cards rocketed me into reading fluency, but I think I could have done it in a much less stressful and more interesting way if I had engaged with the various forms of content that’s out there, even if there is not as much as I would like. But with this much grind, I eventually burned out, however I laid the foundation for the breath of vocabulary to read things and I eventually moved onto reading native level books in a meaningful way. The point is that I did what I think no person should ever have to do. Plus I had sustained a repetitive strain injury from writing so many characters.

I broke up with my girlfriend near the end of 2016 but less than six months later I decided that I wanted to move to China so I picked up reading characters again. I went to the Chinese Language Institute (CLI) in Guilin to continue my Chinese studies. When I got to CLI, I didn’t meet anyone who had gotten as fluent as I had as quickly. I met a lot of people who had a more solid foundation in the language, but few of them could talk to anyone. Ultimately, in my opinion, if you want to really master the language, engaging in native media can give you such a broader view into the culture, the history, and the range of life experiences in China.

Regardless, I have now gone on to read many native Chinese novels and comic books. Overall, I read more slowly than I’d like, but I can read most anything contemporary and use the dictionary maybe once or twice per page. Specifically, I really like martial arts (武侠) a lot and am just a big fan of reading in general…in fact, if anything, perhaps I read TOO much, and probably should prioritize watching more TV. I’d also say reading is very helpful from a grammar perspective…it’s very, very helpful to see how all sorts of different authors describe all sorts of different situations. Reading 武侠 helped a lot with my understanding of how to describe action, because they have to describe these complex fight scenes…especially the author Jin Yong 金庸, he really gets into it. So I’d pay extra attention to the various ways one could describe swords flying around.

I should mention that I’m not the type of person who reads “just to get the gist” of something. I know a lot of language learners will read to try and understand as much as they can and sort of cement the words they do know, but I always read for 100%. This slows me down a lot as I can usually guess the meanings of new words and chengyu and whatnot, but I want to be 100% sure! I have the soul of a translator…

I’d say my views on language learning have evolved a lot. I think people should be honest about their goals, and then construct a plan to achieve those goals. I think tools like Mandarin Companion are absolutely essential, and like I said, I loved reading Great Expectations and really wish I had spent more time with the earlier ones earlier on. I think basically people should buy more or less every graded reader out there and read them as soon as they can, and while I think flashcards are an invaluable tool, mass reading is so much more fun AND is quite effective in helping to cement so much of what is important in studying a language! I think if I had spent more time reading mandarin companion and other graded readers early on — and I do mean study… one can read them, but I think can also study them in more depth — I would have had a lot more examples to learn from and I think I could have avoided a lot of grammar issues that plague me to these days. I believe that mass exposure to vocabulary and grammar in context is an absolutely critical tool to not just build one’s vocabulary, but their knowledge of the language.

In total, I’ve been studying about 3.5 years, and although I believe conversation is the lifeblood of language and without that, it would be hard to motivate myself, but reading offers a billion windows into billions of different stories and lives…that’s true in English as well, but exploring that in Chinese is just too much fun! And you know what? I really wouldn’t be able to explore any of that if I couldn’t read! Thanks to you guys, as you publish more and more books, this will be less of a problem for all of us learning Chinese! Keep it up!

We just launched a podcast! Here is how all of this started.

While in Shanghai, I ride my electric scooter to my office nearly every day. I could take the metro, but between walking and riding, it was a 22 min commute compared to a 10 min scooter ride. However, it was this reduced commute time that got me interested in podcasts. For some reason, being surrounded by people on the subway made me less inclined to put headphones in my ears because I might talk to or interact with someone else. Yet, riding on my bike, it was just me, my two wheels, and the chaotic Shanghai traffic.

One day, I wanted to listen to more than just music. I wanted something that was enriching, informative, and uplifting. My first foray into podcasts occurred when I was a guest on the China Startup Pulse to talk about my other business in China. I didn’t give podcasts much thought then, but this time I began listening in earnest and I got hooked. I started listening to podcasts when I was travelling, washing dishes, cleaning house, or out for a walk. Fast forward one year and hundreds of podcasts later, the idea dawned on me that perhaps John and I should start our own podcast about Chinese.

I searched for Chinese podcasts, and there were many. However, there didn’t seem to be any that were talking about learning Chinese, they were all focused on teaching Chinese. As we talked about it, we felt there was a need for a podcast to talk about how to learn Chinese without trying to teach it to you.

John and I have spent years studying and applying methods of learning Chinese as a second language, John’s specialty being teaching through instruction (that is what he does at AllSet Learning), my specialty being implicit learning through extensive reading. For Mandarin Companion, we have attended Chinese language conferences around the world and worked with hundreds of Chinese teachers and listened to their unique challenges and situations. We know countless individuals who have learned Chinese and all have a different path. When we are frequently asked what is the best way to learn Chinese, we know there is no one-size-fits-all solution. On top of it all, we have learned Chinese and we know for ourselves the challenges a learner faces.

When we framed it like this, it seemed obvious that we needed to start this podcast. This kernel of an idea started nearly six months ago is now the “You Can Learn Chinese” podcast!

What This Podcast Is

This is the very first Chinese podcast of it’s kind! Here is what we will be doing.

• Discussing the best ways to learn Chinese
• Sharing leading research and best practices for learning Chinese
• Identifying trends in Chinese learning (good and bad)
• Discussing funny and interesting instances of Chinese in movies and culture
• Interviewing a wide spectrum of Chinese learners.

For each show, John and I will be discussing different topics followed by a guest interview. We already have many interviews recorded with guests sharing their fascinating and wide ranging experiences with learning Chinese including an actor, a public relations director, a graduate of a dual immersion program, a diplomat, and many more! We’re also on a quest to interview Mark Zuckerberg and John Cena.

What This Podcast Is Not

Since this podcast is much different than your average Chinese podcast, here is what it is NOT.

• A podcast to teach you Chinese
• A podcast in Chinese
• A study program
• Virtual phrase book
• A platform for us to try and show off how awesome our Chinese is

Simply put, we are not your teachers! And while John’s Chinese is good enough to do a podcast in Chinese, mine isn’t (believe me).

Listen to You Can Learn Chinese

Have a listen! You can click here for our short introductory podcast.

That’s not all, we released a second episode too!

But wait, there’s more! We even recorded a THIRD episode for you!

We plan to release a new episode every two weeks. I highly recommend subscribing so that you can automatically receive each new episode. To do so, pick one of these options:

1.  Visit us in the iTunes store, then click ‘Subscribe.’
2. iTunes not your thing? You can find us on Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify and click “Subscribe”.
3. For iphone users you can use Apples iTunes app to listen, for Android users, the Google Podcasts app is an excellent option.
4.  Prefer a different app? Copy and paste this RSS feed into the app, or search for You Can Learn Chinese in the app’s podcast directory: https://rss.simplecast.com/podcasts/10037/rss

You can always visit our podcast website to make comments on episodes and share links with your friends. We plan to release new episodes every two weeks so stay tuned!

If you have any ideas for our podcast, a topic that you think needs to be discussed, or a story to share, please contact us and drop us a note! You can do it!

To start off the new year right, we want to communicate with you on what we have been working on. Just to bring you up to speed, Mandarin Companion is largely a two-man operation consisting of John and myself. This is why at times it takes us longer to release things than perhaps it would normally.

That being said, we’ve been developing a lot of things behind the scenes. Today we are pulling back the curtain to give you a preview of what Mandarin Companion has in store for you in 2019.

New 150 Character Level Books (Breakthrough Level)

Over the years, we’ve received many emails from readers asking for new levels. During the same period, we’ve had the opportunity to attend a number of Chinese language teaching conferences and speak with Chinese teachers about the challenges they face in the classroom. Finding suitable reading materials is a fundamental problem faced by Chinese teachers everywhere. Finding books that are level appropriate for Chinese learners and are fun to read is like finding the holy grail, and for teachers who have used the Mandarin Companion series with students, they absolutely love them and students who do read them experience a lot of progress.

The downside to all of this is that it typically takes students longer than they would like to get to the stage where they can read our level 1 books; in high school it is typically 3-4^th year Chinese students, in Chinese dual-immersion programs it is usually 4^th to 5^th grade students, and in College programs it is usually students somewhere in the middle of the second year. Unfortunately there are too many students who drop out of Chinese programs because they don’t feel like they are making progress or that Chinese is even within their grasp and consequently never reach the level necessary to read a Chinese graded reader. For anyone who has experienced the immense sense of accomplishment from reading an entire book in Chinese, that experience alone has motivated countless readers to continue studying Chinese.

This has given us the impetus to create a new and lower level of Chinese graded readers in a way that has never been done before. We have decided to call this the “Breakthrough Level”. Similar to our other levels, it will be based on a defined character set and any new words occurring outside of that set will be introduced as keywords accompanied by pinyin and a definition. This new Breakthrough Level will be written at a 150-character standard which essentially comes from half of the level 1, 300-character standard.

The trick about Breakthrough Level is that it will not use any new characters outside of the level 1, 300-character standard. That means that any key words used that fall outside of the 150-character standard can only be borrowed from the level 1 standard. Therefore the vocabulary used in the Breakthrough Level standard will be very constrained. We have roughly 10 nouns to work with and a very limited set of verbs. Honestly, at the beginning, the task seemed insurmountable, but we organized the possible words we can use and kicked our creativity into high gear to come up with some new stories that can be written at this level, are of substantial length, and are entertaining to read. These Breakthrough Level stories will be written at the 150-character standard and will be three to four thousand characters long. Nothing like this exists yet! They’ll be actual books, not just short stories.

These new lower level stories will reach learners at an even earlier stage and not only help to accelerate their learning, but also inspire them to continue learning Chinese. We are working on five stories to be released in 2019 including “Young Sherlock Holmes” and “My Teacher is from Mars”. We plan to launch this new level in spring of 2019. It’s going to be great!

New Podcast

Both John and I have been working in Chinese education for a long time and people are always asking us for advice about learning Chinese. We find ourselves talking to so many people that we wanted to find a better way to reach out and help even more people through their trek towards Chinese proficiency.

Therefore, in early 2019, we have decided to launch the “You Can Learn Chinese” podcast about learning Chinese (***UPDATE*** Podcast has since launched, click here). In contrast to the many podcasts intending to teach you Chinese, this podcast will be about learning Chinese. We’ll be discussing the best ways to learn Chinese, the research behind it, and include inspirational stories and guest interviews along the way.

John and I are really excited about this project! We already have recorded a few episodes that are in post-production and plan to launch the podcast soon. We expect it will be an inspiring and edifying podcast, something that we hope you will find helpful and valuable to you, a Chinese learner. We’ll be sending out notifications on how to subscribe and get involved in the coming weeks!

Audio Books

We began production on audio books in 2018 and released five and in 2019 we will release the remainder of the Mandarin Companion series as audio books! We plan on having these available for all newly published books. Now you can listen as you read along. This can be a great boost to building your fluency. It helps readers to read more fluently, recognize tones, and practice listening.

Because the books are available through Audible and iTunes, the listener has the ability to slow down or speed up the recording as needed to suit your comprehension speed.

Level 2 stories and beyond

At the end of 2018, the Mandarin Companion series has 11 titles including 8 level 1 books and 3 level 2 books. Once we complete the Breakthrough Level series, we will be working on new level 2 titles. We have already begun working on some story ideas for level 2 and we are excited to get working on these!

As we finish some new level 2 titles, we will get onto developing a level 3 standard. I don’t want to get your hopes up too soon because creating a new level takes much more time than you might think, but we will be expanding to level 3 in the future, however it will likely be 2020 before we have new level 3 titles released. Nevertheless, they will come!

2019 Year of the Pig

As we are looking forward to this year unfold, we wish all of you a happy new year and we are looking forward to the Year of the Pig on February 5^th with the start of Chinese New Year!

新年快乐！

We’ve received many many emails asking when Emma, The Prince and the Pauper, and The Ransom of Red Chief were going to be available on Kindle. I am extremely pleased to announce that day has come!

You can get each book in simplified or traditional characters now, and just in time for the holiday season!

What was the problem?

The Kindle platform for small publishers and self-publishers allows you to publish books only in certain languages, Chinese not being one of them. That being said, Chinese books would usually get through and we were able to offer our books on Kindle.

However, about two years ago, something changed within Kindle and our attempts to publish new ebooks on their platform were unsuccessful. From what I was able to discover, the content management team at Kindle had upped their game and had begun more thorough checks thereby blocking any new Chinese language book that came onto the platform.

I can’t begin to tell you how many hours I have spent exchanging emails back and forth with the Kindle team continually getting the reply that “this book is in a language currently not supported by Kindle”. Email exchanges like this were commonplace for a period of about a year while I continued to try and get our books approved on the Kindle platform. I contacted different departments at Amazon, got in touch with a former classmate who use to work on the Kindle team for help, and even asked in our newsletter for help from anyone who might know someone on the Kindle team, but all was in vain.

I ended up discovering that the US Kindle team only officially supports languages where they have staff with proficiency in that language in case the content needs to be reviewed by human eyes. Surprisingly, KDP supports some unexpected languages:

• Three dialects of Norwegian (Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Norwegian).
• Manx with only 1,800 speakers all located on the Isle of Mann.
• Luxembourgish spoken by 390,000 people located in Luxembourg.
• North Frisian, a minority language of Germany, spoken by about 10,000 people.
• Provençal, a variety of Occitan spoken by less than 250,000 people in southern France.
• Romansh, a Romance language spoken predominantly in the southeastern Switzerland with an estimated 36,000 native speakers.
• Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language native to Scotland with an estimated 57,000 fluent speakers.
• Even Japanese with 125 million native speakers.

I think it is incredibly admirable the lengths that the Kindle team has gone through to support some of these languages, especially ones that are in risk of being lost. However, I am still unclear why the US Kindle team has chosen not support a language spoken by 16% of the world population with an estimated 1.2 billion native speakers. I also don’t think KDP was amused when I asked to speak with their Manx language speaker on their content review team ?.

What I have learned is that most of the Chinese books available on Kindle are published by larger publishers who have a different type of account and are not subject to the same language restrictions smaller publishers are.

What has changed

Recently, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) merged their operations with CreateSpace, the print-on-demand arm of Amazon. Due to recent changes, we are back in business and we have been able to get our ebooks onto Kindle!

While Chinese is still not an officially supported language by Kindle, we anticipate all of our future books will also be available on Kindle as soon as they are released to the public. This will make things easier for all of our readers, especially those who are in areas where it is not as easy to obtain a print copy!

Get your copy today!

The second installment of Stories form our Readers highlighting the experiences of learners like you on their quest to learn Chinese. If you would like to share your story, please reach out to us!

I would have never imagined that one day I would learn Chinese. My family is bilingual, my husband is from Spain and I speak Spanish and French, but Chinese was never on our radar. It started a few years back; the school my daughters attended ​had been teaching Chinese to the children for a year or two, and decided to start up a Chinese class for families. We sang songs in Chinese, learned animals, colors, and it was such a special experience for us to learn together as a family.

Unfortunately, a while later the classes stopped. Being the sort of person I am, I talked to the head teacher to see if we could find a way to carry on the classes, but to no avail. Soon thereafter, the ​head teacher was contacted about a ​basic level Chinese language and culture class​ for non-Mandarin speaking Primary school teachers. The school didn’t have available staff so ​he offered me the the opportunity to ​go to the course, and then teach ​Chinese in the school! I began teaching 5 to 7 year-old students, but it was amazing to think I was teaching something I was learning as well! It gave me the chance to really reinforce my basic vocabulary of colors, animals, and songs. There were two Chinese teacher​s at the school and it was due to their amazing support that I was able to do it. I had lessons with them where they would teach me Chinese and I would help them with their teaching. It was a real sharing of knowledge.

The following summer, I had the chance to go to Shanghai for a training course. I had been studying Chinese for a year and a half and I had the basics down. It was hard to leave my daughters behind, but it was an amazing opportunity to learn in the country and experience the culture, food, and language for myself! Just being able to use Chinese on a day to day basis was an amazing experience. I was buying fruit at shops, ordering food at restaurants, and even when I would go out for a run in the mornings, I could say to someone “It’s really hot!” and they would understand me!  When you’re learning a language and you’re not in the country, it’s great but you’re learning from a textbook, but going to the country makes it very real. It’s an experience I’ll never forget, to be understood by a real non-teacher native Chinese person.

From the time I began teaching, I had started learning Chinese characters. We found that the Chinese teacher​s ​were initially unsure about teaching the young children Chinese characters but we used it as part of the whole learning experience. We got them drawing characters on water paper which we frequently used in our lessons. By writing very basic characters with the children, it helped me to build my confidence to learn. The most challenge transition was moving from the HSK 2 level to HSK 3. The pinyin was gone and I had to knuckle down and learn how to read the characters.

I was getting to a point where I was almost ready to give up because learning the characters was just so hard. I had spent countless hours learning the HSK 1 and 2 characters but I didn’t know what to do with all of this knowledge of the simple individual characters. I wanted to find something I could read that wasn’t in a textbook. The textbook stuff, although it’s important, it’s not really interesting. It’s not fun to read a conversation about somebody having difficult homework and the mum tells off the child. It may be conversations but it’s not a book.

As I was looking online for something about HSK practice conversation, I stumbled upon Mandarin Companion. I started reading about graded readers and I thought “this is exactly what I need!” It was an amazing moment, it really was!

I ordered a book and when I sat down to read for the first time, I was astonished with absolute disbelief that I could actually read characters without pinyin! Suddenly all of those individual characters made sense, it all just came together. It was simple enough for me to read and understand a full sentence, I just wanted to keep reading and reading just because I couldn’t believe I was reading in Chinese! I felt that I shouldn’t be able to do this. I had never thought I would ever be able to read a book in Chinese. I kept reading to prove to myself “yeah, I can do this, this is real!”

The day I finished my first book, oh my goodness, I was running around the house! I ran to my daughters because they kept asking me if I had finished it, and when I did I was running around yelling “I finished it! I finished a book in Chinese!” It was a fairly crazy moment in our house!

Sometimes when I read at home, my youngest daughter hangs over my shoulder and picks out characters that she knows. I think it’s made my daughters a lot more confident to learn Chinese when they see their 45 year-old  mum reading in Chinese. It proves to them, yes, you can learn characters, you’ve just got to keep working and keep learning. I’m not studying so I can get a job or go off to study at University, but just for my own love of languages and a challenge for myself. To combat my midlife crisis, I just keep learning Chinese!

My favorite story was “The Sixty Year Dream” and I created my own bookmarks to help me remember the character names. I photocopied the pictures of the characters at the front of the books, cut them into strips, and laminated it to create my own book marks. It helped me so that I didn’t need to keep flipping to the front of the book. Names can be so confusing in Chinese. Sometimes you don’t know what a word is and it doesn’t make sense, then after a while you realize you’ve been trying to make sense of a name. I also found it very useful in the books that character names were made up of commonly used Chinese characters which helped to reinforce those characters.

Sometimes I would learn something in a lesson but I wasn’t able to fully grasp it. Later when I was reading one of the Mandarin Companion stories, I was would see it used in sentences in various ways and think “Ah! That’s how it’s used!” This happened frequently with grammatical structures. Most of the examples in textbooks were not as helpful because they are staged conversations. But if you actually see the pattern used in the flow of a story, you think “that makes sense now!” This happened when I learned the word 想. I didn’t fully grasp how it was used, but after seeing it in multiple contexts in the story, it finally made sense and I learned how to use it! This also happened with tenses, using negatives, comparisons with “比” and so on. It’s been incredibly useful to reinforce things I’ve learned and make it real.

Before I read these books I honestly thought that my Chinese would be limited to simple conversation and a basic vocabulary, but now I really believe that I can continue to progress. My vocabulary and grammar has dramatically improved which has had a huge impact on my listening and spoken Mandarin. I feel so much more confident to keep learning and keep using my Mandarin. It has helped with every aspect of learning!

To be able to read a book with no pinyin and understand it has just been one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever come across. There are loads of people out there saying, “OMG, I’m trying to learn Chinese and it’s really hard!” but reading suddenly made everything make sense and joined everything together. That is where the Mandarin Companion books have just been amazing and I am so appreciative of how they have positively influenced my Chinese. I feel like I’ve been paid to say this but I’m not! It’s massively impacted my motivation to keep learning and inspired me to move on to the next level.

Harriet Simpson is a 45 year-old wife and mother of two young girls, 11 and 9, residing in Blackpool, England. She works as a Speech and Language Therapist in a primary school and enjoys playing the clarinet and the piano. She and her family are a self described “outdoors” family, preferring to play old fashioned games such as Scrabble and frequently eschew screen time.

Guest post by Diane Neubauer

You are learning Chinese and want to read too. Great! I am going to share some ideas to help you make your reading experience more pleasant and productive. Yes, even if you only know 100 or 50, or yes, dare I say as little as 10 characters, there are ways to read very simply in Chinese and even apply extensive reading at the true beginner levels.

Reading Chinese, in a lot of ways, can feel like starting all over, even if you can understand spoken Chinese well. But reading in Chinese is awesome; it feels like taking Chinese from black-and-white to vivid color. Being able to connect the written with the spoken language has been a rewarding experience that seems to deepen my understanding of the logic of the Chinese language and how concepts overlap in different words. Being able to use Chinese in text messages with friends, comments online, or even reading subtitles on a favorite show is worth it.

When I say “read”, I do not mean merely recognizing words in isolation, or being able to memorize characters or their components. Those are great skills. However, I’ve seen students ( myself included) work hard to memorize individual characters or words in isolation and still struggle to understand sentences and paragraphs, even when they contain familiar words. When I use the word “read”, I mean understanding texts that are sentence-long, paragraph-long, and multi-paragraph-long. If you too wish to learn to read Chinese like this, then read on!

How I Learned Chinese

I have taught Mandarin Chinese in elementary, middle, and high schools since 2007, however I didn’t grow up speaking Chinese. I was born in the USA in an English-speaking home. I didn’t begin studying Chinese until I was 19 and since that time I’ve seen a significant amount of change in the way Chinese is being taught and learned.

My college Chinese classes were fairly typical: we recited vocabulary, studied grammar, practiced handwriting, focused on pronunciation, and translated texts. I worked with flashcards to practice vocabulary, and when reading, I slowly pieced together the meaning one word at a time. Reading material, which came from our textbook, included short conversations with plenty of new words that were used once or twice each. Occasionally we would read a short story about a chengyu (4-character-long sayings often referring to legends or historical events). If you wanted to read something, you had to translate it if you really wanted to understand the message and I found it took a lot of work to think in Chinese. However, the program and my professor were very highly regarded and I was committed to working hard.

After college, I studied and worked in China for nearly four years. I had three semesters of one-on-one classes at a university. My instructors did use a textbook, but there was less focus on it. Instead, my favorite teacher would draw on words from a vocabulary list as we would talk about our life experiences. There was more emphasis on understanding my teacher and what we read together than producing new words and sentence patterns. My teachers would rephrase and expand on what I said so I heard native Chinese examples of what I intended to say, rather than make me rehearse sentences that weren’t my own. As result there was more of a back-and-forth discussion at my level of comprehension.

Teaching Career

After I moved back in the US in 2004, I started tutoring in Chinese and then in 2007 began teaching Mandarin Chinese in a school. At that time, there were few textbooks (mainly those designed for college students) and fewer learner resources online. I was teaching 10-year-old beginners, so I went back to what I knew: teaching a mix of vocabulary, grammar, handwriting, and pronunciation combined with dialogue and games in attempt to make class time for fun. However, I wasn’t seeing the progress I believed was possible which set me on a professional quest to find a better way.

Today there is more interesting content for beginners, like story books and video series. There are also excellent podcasts, apps, and games available. But what if materials promoted as “beginning level” are really a struggle? As noted in articles in this blog and other sites about learning Chinese, reading that is too difficult is not only demotivating and time consuming, it pays off less in terms of your development of reading skills.

So what should you do? Do you just need to buckle down, work on memorizing characters, and wait for a payoff months or years into the future when you can read something enjoyable? Are there any alternatives to memorizing lists of characters and words so you can hope someday to read something in Chinese?

What I’m about to share with you is drawn from 10 years of learning, research, and experimenting along with students over the years. My students have helped me to work out how reading Chinese can work, even from the first week of classes.

1. Focus on Listening Comprehension

At the beginning, focus on listening comprehension for perhaps a few days or weeks, depending on how much time you have for learning and how soon you want to read. It is very helpful to first have a good 语感, the Chinese word for “language feel”, which several studies call “mental representation”. This can significantly help when you read Chinese because your brain will have a better sense at what “sounds right”. Having this feel for the language reduces the cognitive load, or the amount your brain is required to work, thereby freeing up more mental space allowing you to devote more mental energy, or working memory, to context and making sense of the meaning.

2. Pinyin first, characters second

Research on people learning Chinese as a second language suggests that spending some time focusing on pinyin without characters, and developing some listening comprehension can help learners begin to read Chinese character texts more easily and faster than by trying to learn both at the same time. My own experiences teaching students confirm this finding. In the classroom, when I first focused the student on understanding the word in context and then afterwards focusing on the character, I found students had a smoother process connecting the characters to the sounds and meanings that were already firm in their minds. (I shared that anecdote within an article available here.)

3. Read only familiar words for a while

When you do decide to read text with Chinese characters, find materials that stay within the words you already know when you hear them aloud — no new words! This is helpful for when you are FIRST beginning to read. This helps because it draws on language that has already been introduced and is developing in your head thereby strengthening it with visual representation. Having that nice foundation in the basic language is a great thing! It will prepare you for graded readers at the 300 character level and up. Even when we do begin reading texts with new characters, we want just a little bit, around just 2%, of new vocabulary. See ideas below for ways to get reading material like that — it’s not easy to find when you’re a true beginner!

4.Re-read

Read what you can and then milk it for all its worth. If re-reading as a language learning technique doesn’t sound familiar to you, let me recommend this well-written blog post explaining why and how it helps. If you are a language teacher, you particularly might also want to read another post by the same author, Justin Slocum Bailey, who describes a technique for pre-reading and re-reading in a classroom setting. Here are some re-reading ideas:

1. Pick a few highlighters or colored pencils. On the first time reading, highlight words you recognized easily. The second time, use a new color to highlight words you recognize better that time through. On the third pass, highlight words in a third color. (If you have a lot of unhighlighted words after multiple read-throughs, you may want to consider putting that aside for now and find something easier to understand).
2. After reading once or twice, change the names of the people in a dialogue to people who interest you, famous or from your own life. Read it again and imagine how those people would react to each other in that dialogue.
3. Read again with the names of people you chose inserted but now change the dialogue ever so slightly – swap out a verb or make a negative statement instead of a positive one. The point really isn’t to write, but to make a parallel version of something you already can read so that you can read it again and think about the meaning in a fresh way. If you do this right, it’s not a writing exercise or a drill, but a chance to make a spoof out of your textbook dialogue or at least create a version more meaningful & interesting to you.
4. Read it aloud once you have read it silently a few ways. Then, read it aloud in different emotions. Read it like you have a head cold. Read it like you’re a newscaster, your best friend, or your favorite cartoon character. Read it like you just breathed helium. You get the idea: make it fun to read again so that you can process the reading material in a somewhat fresh way.
5. If you enjoy drawing, read again, and draw a comic strip version of what happens. Or, use clipart or images you find online for the same purpose.

You certainly do not have to use all of these methods with everything you read. The point is not to memorize a text, but to get the most use out of the limited amount of reading material you can read when you are a beginner. These are simply choices to pick from and there are likely many more creative ways to make re-reading a pleasure!

5. Ping pong reading with a friend.

Do you have another Chinese reader who will read with you? After you read silently on your own, ask your friend to take turns reading a sentence. After they read aloud in Chinese, translate it’s meaning into your language or act out its meaning. Then switch roles; you read the next sentence out loud in Chinese and your partner translates or acts out the meaning. Continue reading going back and forth like this. Some language teachers call this “volleyball reading” but I think it’s more like ping pong reading, since it’s one-on-one. If it’s fun for you, keep score: one point for reading aloud and one point for giving the meaning in your first language. Translation of this type can be useful to confirm your comprehension and is a good skill to have its own right.

6. Ask a friend to write what you can say.

Find a friend who knows Chinese well and can write or type. Sticking only to Chinese you know well, begin to describe a scene or a story. Your Chinese-proficient friend types or writes as you talk. Every so often, pause and read what has been written so far. This is known as The Language Experience Approach. If you are already able to speak Chinese to some degree but do not yet read, it can be a very valuable exercise. The goal is not to type your story as briefly as possible, but to get to see your current vocabulary in print many times. Do not be afraid to repeat some things and include details the best you are able. When you are done, have your friend read the text aloud with you, pointing at each word as it is read aloud. (To me, this sounds like a really great date night with a more proficient Chinese learner or a native speaker, but I might be a geek.) Here I am with a beginning Chinese class doing the same approach, asking them questions to retell a story we made up in class the day before. I typed and expanded on their comments. Here’s a Spanish teacher’s example where he’s hand-writing on a whiteboard.

7. Listen to slow audio while you read along

Find audio materials that coordinate with reading you can understand. Listen to SLOW audio with reading material that includes words you already know by sound. Subtitled audio and video like on FluentU or Yabla may work for you. Audio with transcripts like the Chairman’s Bao, ChinesePod.com, or DuChinese (or a number of other apps) do this, too. For this purpose, I have shared a few videos on YouTube with reading made for my students. Playing videos on slower speeds, pausing and going back, and muting to predict, then listening to check what you read can be useful ways to use subtitled videos. Music videos would work for this too if you have a good understanding of what the lyrics mean. With song, you could even just sing the chorus as it repeats more and often seems simpler than the verses.

Here’s a good one to start: 对不起，我的中文不好 by the band Transition.

8. Read simple books

Find the easiest books that are designed to help you learn to read. These materials intentionally limit the number of vocabulary items, and they intentionally repeat the use of those words — kind of how Dr. Seuss books work. A common mistake is to choose children’s books written for Chinese kids. However, these are not suitable for you because they are not written for you, they are written for Chinese kids who can already understand and speak the language. Think of how a child can understand a book being read to them even though they cannot read it themselves.

Graded readers are recommended instead. These type of story books are designed for those learning Chinese as a second language. These books deliberately include some aids to comprehension and repeated use of vocabulary, such as larger font sizes, word spacing, color, and easily-accessible pinyin (but pinyin that is not placed over the characters).

Sometimes people say that such reading materials don’t “sound natural” because they have simpler language than most native speakers use in real life. Let’s look at it this way: does Dr. Seuss “sound natural”? Perhaps some is not, but such books give English learners simpler, sheltered, scaffolded reading materials that are a lot of fun. And it is real language nonetheless, just simplified using limited vocabulary. Here are some suggestions for beginning level reading materials:

1. Books by Terry Waltz: short story books and the chapter book, Susan you mafan
2. Books by Haiyun Lu: book series
3. Books by Linda Li and Stephen Krashen: Shei hao kan? and Haokan shi bu gou de
4. Books by Pu-mei Leng: chapter books

9. Read what you like

Find topics and stories that you enjoy reading about. If you can’t find enough materials that are at your level, you can at least aim for reading things that you find cute, funny, or intriguing in some way, since those will keep your interest longer when it is a bit more challenging. Materials like those can be found in podcasts and apps which organize content by level and list topics in English. This idea of reading what you find more enjoyable is not a new idea, but part of the theory behind free voluntary reading.

10. Re-read what you read last month, semester, year…

Go back and read again things you read a few weeks or a few months ago to realize your progress. Speaking from personal experience, it can be very motivating to realize that you can read faster and easier than you could in the past! Sometimes you may see some words you’ve forgotten. No problem! This re-reading lets you catch them again as you keep stepping towards that 300 character mark, which at that point, the choice of materials you can read really begins to open up.

If you’ve been feeling like there is nowhere to start, now you have some tools and resources to get out there and start reading. You don’t need to stare at pages of Chinese text looking for characters you know like a Chinese version of Where’s Waldo. You can begin to read Chinese right now!