Bilingual Books

[agradychandler]

Do any of you recommend any websites that sell bilingual books? Specifically, I am looking for novels with parallel translations, Chinese (characters & pinyin) on one side, English on the other side of the page.

My Chinese level is upper intermediate and I'm tired of reading textbooks and also tired of reading Chinese/English books that don't have pinyin so I have to look up 10+ words per page sometimes to find the pronunciation.

Any recommendations of specific books or sellers would be great.

[skylee]

I was going to suggest you read websites of the HK government as they are all bilingual. But they are probabaly not what you want.

Chinese books that Chinese adults read are without pinyin. Not having pinyin is normal.

[rkraft]

Have a look at China.org.cn's Learning English section. There are lots of -shorter- articles side-by-side in English and Mandarin. No pinyin though...

[edelweis]

How do you define Upper Intermediate? What textbooks and novels have you read in the past?

[agradychandler]

I know that bilingual books from China do not have PINYIN and that is the problem. I have accumulated quite a few of these books (i.e. Pride and Predjudice, Huckleberry Finn, etc), but I am constantly having to lookup the pronunciation of the characters. That is why I am looking for a book that has all three: characters, pinyin and English.

For example, check out the KJV of the Bible on Amazon.com: It show the Characters, Pinyin and English, my ideal strategy for learning, but the KJV of the Bible is very old text and boring. Any ideas?

http://www.amazon.com/English-Simplified-characters-Punctuation-romanisation/dp/8990233305

[character]

http://chinasprout.com has lots of bilingual books. The ones I've gotten didn't have pinyin, but looking up characters is what Pleco's OCR is for.

You didn't mention the number of characters you know, but there are a number of series only in Chinese, with set or fairly limited numbers of different characters, such as

Chinese Breeze http://chinasprout.com/shop/BLH169 (also on Kindle)

Tales and Traditions http://www.cheng-tsu...ales_traditions

Chinese Readers http://chinasprout.com/shop/BLH166

http://www.chinesema...chmystzguo.html

http://www.nanhaiboo...ories.html The two books I've seen in this series have an English summary, then Chinese/Pinyin.

[xiaotao]

There are complete Chinese translations of American books on line. For example, google Animal Farm. You can copy the text to Mandarinpot.com and mouse over the pinyin annoted characters for pop definition.

[edelweis]

@agradychandler:

The books you mention (Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn) are unlikely to have much useful modern vocabulary (unless you have a very specific goal?).

Additionally books translated from English tend to have lots of annoying transliterations.

I guess that's why you need to look up the pronunciation and not the meaning of the characters?

After reading several short books of the Chinese Breeze series (no pinyin, no English, but you only need to know 300 characters for the 1st level),

and then reading a few short stories from "Graded Chinese Reader 1" (characters + pinyin but no full English translation),

I thought reading translations of Agatha Christie books would be a good way to start reading full novels in Chinese.

But then I found out about the transliterations, the vocabulary issues, and generally the fact that it is a translation, so the sentences and flow are not what Chinese people would write. Edit: Also such books obviously won't teach you anything about Chinese culture, Chinese etiquette, Chinese behaviours, mindset, society, etc.

So I switched to reading easy novels and short stories by Chinese authors.

活着 is short and globally easy to follow. Edit: and it has been translated, so your local library may have the English version.

圈子圈套 is longer and a little harder but has lots of useful modern vocabulary. Edit: in addition it immerses you into modern Chinese business life.

Both have been discussed in the "Book of the Month" section on this forum.

My personal mindset is more "just follow the story and only look up unknown words that appear frequently" (I learn words from vocabulary lists independently from my reading time).

Other people prefer reading on-line and using pop-up dictionary programs to look up words quickly and add them to their vocabulary lists or SRS programs. If you prefer to understand every word and every sentence, that's probably the way to go.

I can only suggest that you adapt your learning strategy, because there are not many (any?) interesting books out there which have at once characters, pinyin and English.

The suggestions in the post by "character" are good, and I have used several of them. But none match exactly your requirements.

[tooironic]

Once you get beyond the "upper-intermediate level" (what that is exactly, I'm not sure) you'll never want to look at pinyin again, especially not in sentence form! Struggling to look up characters is all part of experience of learning Chinese. Reading through long paragraphs of Roman letters does nothing to improve your reading speed or proficiency. You're gonna have to learn to read without it someday, so you may as well get ready. The key is to find something to read which is truly at your level - i.e. not too easy, not too hard. I think @edelweis's suggestions above are good.

[flynnfrogg]

there is a bi-lingual section in every issue of the Chinese (traditional) Reader's Digest - you might find that useful

[smurese]

Here's a bit of input on bilingual reading not yet covered by the above discussion:

To get what you want, I agree with @xiaotao that your best bet is to read electronic Chinese texts and use an annotator to get whatever pinyin you need plus all the other data that an annotator can give you.

For novels and other literature, there are hundreds upon hundreds, if not thousands, freely available through just the 15 websites listed here [ http://www.learnchin...literature.html ]. There are over 10 free sources for graded readers to suit whatever Chinese reading level you might be at, listed on this page [ http://www.learnchin...ce-improve.html ] - a bonus are some comprehension activities that will test and exercise your reading ability.

@xiaotao mentioned Mandarinpot.com for their online annotating service. There are quite a few out there. Most of the websites for handy Chinese tools listed here have their annotation tools. And the Xiaoma dictionary on this list of top online Chinese dictionaries also has an annotation service. If you wanted annotation software to run locally from your own computer, there are plenty to choose from too, including MDBG's own Chinese Reader on this list of free Chinese learning software.

Having said that about using an annotator, there are at least two extensive sources on the Web, which you will find in the Graded Reading list mentioned above, that do have the facility to show pinyin. The U.S. National Foreign Language Center website for Chinese reading has reading passages (over 120) with separate pinyin, and a button to obtain the full English translation; and the very extensive graded reading materials made freely available at Yes-Chinese seem to be all linked to their online dictionary, so there's lots of information (including audio) available on every single character in the passage (seems to be very sophisticated stuff).

So those are some options for you that can keep you reading, with some pinyin support.

Hmmm... now that we've dealt with pinyin availability, there are not many of the resources above that will have translations in English also available, although automatic annotation can give you the English for each single word. Well, on the page for "Classics of Ancient Chinese Literature Online", I dug up one website that has a treasure trove of Chinese literature with quite a bit in English (not all). Here are some examples of their various collections:

- Stories From Chinese Classical Literature, English edition, Chinese edition

- Chinese Literature Classics

- Classical Chinese Novels

- they also have World Literature with Chinese Translation, but as @edelweiss has mentioned above, there are limitations with material that was originally written in a foreign language or in a different era.