What to read after Chinese Breeze?

[Friday]

I've finished many of the Chinese Breeze series and am looking for more material for brisk reading practice and enjoyment.

I've found two titles so far:

Abridged Chinese Classic Series - These books say they are for the 2,000 character level, but seem about right for me and the stories are fairly interesting.

Graded Chinese Reader 3 - This says it is for the 1,000 character level, but it seems more difficult than the Abridged Chinese Classic Series books. I feel that I spend more time checking the definitions in the back than reading, so it is too difficult.

Some other books I found in the bookstore have too many photographs, which brings the price up too high, and too few words.

Can you recommend any other readers?

[Silent]

After Chinese Breeze I read 自行车王国 from the 中文天天读 series. Supposedly 1000 characters, but it felt easier than Chinese Breeze to me. I think it has more vocabulary, but somewhat easier grammar. Also it contains short stories, so it's less likely that missing some details will impact your understanding later on in the book.

For me the main disadvantage of it is the interlined pinyin. It distracts, I caught myself quite often mainly reading the pinyin and looking at the characters for disambiguation instead of reading characters and looking at pinyin for pronunciation. Also the shorter stories make it much easier to miss details or to interpret incorrectly and never know about it. With longer stories like Chinese Breeze misinterpretations often result in nonsense later. Result, re-reading parts with other interpretations as a result. I think this feedback is educational. Despite the disadvantages I ordered level 3 and 4 books of the series.

I remember that I found somewhere here on the forum a post about the Graded Chinese Reader saying that 3 is harder than 1 despite that it claims to have less words. So there's suspicion the word count of Graded Chinese Reader 3 is incorrect.

[laurenth]

Hello Friday,

I've finished reading all of the level 2 Chinese Breeze books. After that, I read Graded Chinese Reader 1. Of course, it was harder than Chinese Breeze, and yet fairly easy (some short stories more than others), as I didn't have to resort too often to the dictionary, which would have killed the fun.

Confusingly, GCR 1 has a 2000 word level, GCR 2 has a 3000 word level, but GCR 3 has a 1000 word level.

I found that the stories in GCR 1 were much better than those in Chinese Breeze (after all, they are supposed to be abridged/simplified stories written by "true" authors… and they use more words). The pinyin above the lines is distracting, though, even when using the special sheet that hides one line out of two. The accompanying CD is very good.

I've also bought GCR 2 but haven't tried to read it just yet.

Bye,

Laurenth

[Friday]

Okay, I will try to find Graded Chinese Reader 1. Thanks for the suggestions.