I wrote Beginner to Intermediate level mini novels (500 to 5000 characters) for Chinese learners on my blog

[moonlight]

The goal of my writing is to produce good stories for adult Chinese learners (Beginner to Intermediate) to read and practice their Chinese. You can read them in both simplified and tranditional Chinese with the help of pinyin, vocab table and English translation all on one page. In my latest publish “我身后的眼睛” [The Eyes Behind Me], I also included “Reading Comprehension Quiz” following each short chapter:

If that sounds interesting to you, you’re more than welcomed to drop by and leave me your feedback there. Your comment will not only help me to improve but also help other learners: justlearnchinese.com

A brief summary of my blog here if you don’t know yet: It’s a place for Chinese learners to study the language and know the culture. You'll find lots of original learning materials: grammar lessons, character lessons, culture and slang, idioms etc. There are also songs, TV episode and movies that I recommend.

Your help is much appreciated! Thanks!

[acatt]

Your website is outstanding. Keep up the excellent work.

[moonlight]

Thanks acatt for your encouraging words!

[moonlight]

To accat: Thank you for your support! Much appreciated. If you can understand most of the conversation in 新结婚时代, your Chinese listening should be really good. That's one of my favorite episode and I believe it is valuable to Chinese learners due to its coverage on interesting current topics of people's life.

To OneEye: I should have done a bit more research on the naming. I do have a couple reader friends (with English as their first language) that help me proofread my English writing or translations on the blog frequently. They always give me honest suggestions and I do modify my writing accordingly.

Since no one has mentioned anything about the naming it was never brought to my attention. After a bit research online, I realize that strictly speaking, those four types of "novels" in Chinese could roughly translated into the following four categories: short story, novelette, novella, novel. Then my "mini novels" should be better called as "short stories" in English. I will modify it on the blog when I got a free cycle. Thanks for your advice.

[moonlight]

Please be aware that the top menu (the first menu item on second top menu bar) has been changed from "mini novels" to "short stories", the rest in titles and content will be changed gradually when I have time.

[imron]

Regardless of what they are called, it looks to be a very useful resource.

[moonlight]

Thanks, imron! :-)

[SinoPhil]

I totally agree with Imron. Looks like great stuff. Thank you, Moonlight!

[moonlight]

It's my pleasure, SinoPhil. Thanks for your comment!

[Olle Linge]

This looks great, will share! I have a small suggestion, though. It would be useful if you included information about what you call beginner, elementary, intermediate and so on. As a learner, it's sometimes very hard to know which category one belongs to. Sure, a potential reader could try one from each category, but since you probably have some kind of standard yourself, it would be cool if you let people know about it. How many words/characters are needed (approximately, of course) to read stories from each category?

[moonlight]

To Snigel: That's a very good suggestion! I actually wanted to put down some description there on how I rate each level at the very beginning, but had left it out for other priorities. You just reminded me to fill in this gap. It's updated under "Short Stories" page now. Thank you!

To Flying Pigeon: Thanks for your encouragement! Chinese Radical Show is a popular section on my site based on the traffic report. It actually works together with "JLC Chinese Character Lessons" to help ambitious learners to memorize characters in a "manageable brute force" manner. :-)

[daofeishi]

The page looks excellent, and straddles an important gap between resources for beginners and native-level material. I'm bookmarking the page, and will make sure to pass it on to others who might find it useful.

Let me just point out something I just noticed. On the last line of the text 分手, the pinyin and characters don't match up. The characters are 就这样，他们以分手结束了三年的爱情，but the pinyin says "jiu zheyang, tamen yi fen shou gaobie"

[moonlight]

That's a good catch, daofeishi. It's corrected now. Thanks!

[imron]

Discussion of terminology for novels has been moved here.

[moonlight]

If you're interested in real life mysterious events, you might like this story. I wrote it in Elementary level Chinese based on real events that happened in Xinjiang Province of China.

It's devided into 12 short chapters (a bit more than 2000 characters in total) in both simplified and traditional Chinese. A downloadable mp3 recording comes with each chapter. You can also test your comprehension in a short quiz following each chapter. Please let me know whether you like the story and whether you can comfortably read through the story with the help of vocable table. Any constructive comments and suggestions are welcomed too. Thanks!

A Real Mystery Story in Lop Nur: 失踪 (Missing) 1 [Elmentary]

(You can click into other chapters from the list under "category" on your right hand side.)