Mandarin Companion Graded Reader: "The Secret Garden" 300 char level

[roddy]

I'd say sooner rather than later - after all, most authentic Chinese texts don't do this, so they're going to have to get used to it sharpish anyway. 

[Sobria-Ebritas]

I´m not going to harp on this. I´d just like to point out that a college or high school student who has studied Chinese for 1-2 years probably doesn't need to have a word like 中国 underlined. I’m sure that cases like this will be taken into account in future titles of the series.

 

海南在中国的最南边

 

By the way, can these books be bought from China? Thank you.

[Rufus]

Currently the books are available in ebook format which can be purchased in just about any country you are residing. You can buy it on Amazon, iBooks, and Kobo. We plan on having print books available early next year. 

 

I'm also pleased to say that we recently released our second book "The 60 Year Dream" 《六十年的梦》 and is now available on Amazon. We're working on "The Monkey's Paw" right now and should be available later this week or early next week. 

[imron]

Out of curiosity, is there a reason you are choosing western stories for this?  Presumably for familiarity with western audiences?

[Rufus]

There are a number of reasons, but the familiarity to western audiences is certainly a factor. 

[imron]

There are a number of reasons

Well, as per my original question, I'm still curious about these other ones too

[Balthazar]

I bought "The 60 Year Dream" a couple of days ago after seeing this thread. I do think the price is a bit stiff (14.95$ for 50-60 pages), but perhaps I've been spoiled by my previous purchase of the Chinese Breeze series which I bought from China (not Amazon).

 

In any case, judging by the bit I've read (a couple of pages) this is good stuff. I don't have much experience with graded readers (I'm afraid I never got started on the Chinese Breeze books, for some reason) so I can't really make a sound comparison with anything else, but so far I find it just challenging enough for me. I have to look up a few words (strangely enough it's rarely those that are dealt with in footnotes), and it's going slow (I wish I had a Chinese-English dictionary on my Kindle), but it's surprisingly enjoyable. Perhaps because the only texts I've read previously are dialogues from my textbook. Here, whenever I grasp the meaning of the sentence, it feels a lot more like a personal achievement.

 

I do appreciate the underlining of the names of the characters, and I really appreciate the e-book format. Will probably check out the first one too, once I complete this.

[li3wei1]

Back to the underlining of proper names: I've seen some readers at a more advanced level where the glossed words are marked with footnotes or asterisks, and the proper names are underlined, and glossed in a separate list. I thought, why bother? why not treat proper names the same as other vocabulary items, mark them the same, and gloss them in the same list?

[langxia]

@Balthazar : That was my thought aswell, but it seems that e-books now a days are as expensive as a printed book that gets printed in a very good quality. I can understand that people want to earn money, but having grown up in a book shop I can't understand why you would pay the same price for something virtual than you would pay for something real. Especially as the producer doesn't have the costs of producing a physical thing, no stocking costs, no transportation costs, etc...

And as you say me too I am spoiled with the prices of the chinese Breeze (the last one I bought was 16 Yuan).

[Rufus]

@Balthazar, thanks for your support and comments. I too think that $14.95 is a bit expensive! We set the price for our books to only $9.95. I'd be interested to know through which platform you purchased the book and what country you live in. I do know that Amazon seems to engage in a bit shifty pricing depending on your region. Still trying to get to the bottom of things with them.

 

If you have feedback on specific words you have trouble with or suggestions, feel free to send me a PM!

[Rufus]

@imron, I think that Western readers find Western stories more relevant to them. I think it is important for Chinese learners to understand Chinese culture, history, folklore, and customs and these compose the main bulk of Chinese content available to Chinese learners. However, if given a choice, many individuals would prefer to read a western story. We want to provide that choice. 

 

@li3wei1, we will definitely reexamine our methodology as the levels increase. For the low elementary level, we have found that this is quite helpful to the readers. The reading and learning is step by step! 

[Balthazar]

@Rufus, I live in Norway and I bought the book through amazon.com. When I search for the books they are listed at $9.95, but once I click one of the titles to get to the "book page" the price changes to $14.94 ("including VAT").

 

I know for a fact that while books (all written materials, really) are exempted from VAT in my country, for some silly reason electronic books are not (+25%). So that may be part of the explanation, although it doesn't quite explain the 50% price hike. Oh well.

[imron]

I can't understand why you would pay the same price for something virtual than you would pay for something real.

Because for the majority of books (i.e. not major best-sellers that sell millions of copies), the majority of the costs involved in producing a book are nothing to do with whether or not you have a physical or virtual copy.

First you have the author(s) who need to be paid, as do the editors, the graphic artists, the page-setters and type-setters, for a book like this you also need people doing research to make sure the content is suitable and at an appropriate level, and that there is cohesion between different books and so on and so on, then there's marketing, sales and advertising and more.  All of these are non-trivial costs, plus it's also worth providing a reasonable profit to the people who take the risk to produce such content, and to give them incentive to keep creating them.

 

On top of all of that, if you purchase through Apple iTunes, 30% of that goes to Apple, and I'm sure the other e-tailers have similar pricing (they need to maintain massive servers and databases and employ people skilled enough to keep them running).

 

The reality is, most of the cost to produce a book is still going to be the same whether it's virtual or physical, and pricing reflects that to a large degree.

 

Don't believe me, check out this article, and this one, and this one, and any one of dozens of others telling the same story.

[character]

Mandarin Companion/Roddy were kind enough to send me a PDF of "The Secret Garden"《秘密花园》for review. Compared to other 300-character readers, such as those in the Chinese Breeze series, The Secret Garden has higher production values, with color illustrations every few pages. Using 300 characters, 400 elementary words, and totalling 9,800 characters in length, the story and illustrations cover 71 pages of the 114 page PDF. There is also a list of 73 vocabulary words, discussion questions, and other material. The text is a good mix of description and dialogue. Being based on Western literature seems to be a unique take on the graded reader, allowing students to read the original and then the reader. I've not finished reading it yet, but I'm finding it enjoyable, and I appreciate that it has a good mix of sentence lengths. The Chinese Breeze series tended toward very long sentences, which may or may not be more authentically Chinese, but is perhaps not the best for beginning students. The Secret Garden seems a worthy addition to the small pool of graded readers, and to have it available as an ebook makes it even more welcome. Some things I've seen in other beginning material which the company may wish to consider adding are grammar sections like those in The Lady In The Painting and a careful repetition of characters as in the DeFrancis series.

Thanks to Mandarin Companion/Roddy for the opportunity to review The Secret Garden.

[imron]

After seeing this one, would you consider purchasing others in the series?

[character]

@imron, I certainly would, though I personally might wait for the higher level books, as I've read The Lady In The Painting and most of the Chinese Breeze 300-level books. For people just starting to read, I would say The Secret Garden is easier to read than the Chinese Breeze 300-level books, but perhaps not as easy as The Lady In The Painting.

[roddy]

Thanks to Character, first to give us some feedback on his review copy. 

 

Anyone who was interested in this topic will be doubly-interested to read this - an opportunity to work your way through the reader in parallel with other students of a similar level. Go say hello. 

[ChTTay]

I really liked the illistrations on the cover, of the characters and throughout the book. The illistrations broke up the text nicely and added to the context/understanding.

In my version, the space between characters is quite big. It took me a bit of getting used to and, at first, it was as if I was jumping from character to character rather than "reading". This might just be because of the .pdf formatting of the copy I was sent via email though.

I couldn't actually remember what the secret garden story was at first which meant I really didn't know what was coming next. I think this helped a bit as I really wanted to know what happened next. I found the story engaging and enjoyable overall. As the level is quite low, i found some of the story telling somewhat simple but the main points from the original story are all there. It didn't detract from enjoyment. You also get a sense for each of the characters, who they are, how they change etc as the story goes on.

Overall, I found the level very easy and didn't really need to check anything during reading. This wasn't a problem for me though as it was quite nice just to read and understand something in Chinese for the entirety. I think this book would have been perfect as more of a study aid when I first started studying.

Compared to the Chinese Breeze level one books, I found The Secret Garden to be easier. As the other review mentioned, the sentences in The Secret Garden have a good mix of longer and shorter ones. I also found the grammar structures used to be a bit simplier.

However, I also found The Secret Garden a far more interesting story than most of the stories I've read in the Breeze series. I was a bit disappointed when It ended. I am not sure if this is because it's a western story or not. The problem I had with the three or four C.B books I've read is that the topics/stories just weren't that interesting for me. The best of the CB stories so far, for me, has been the one with the two twins, one of which is found dead and the mystery surrounding that.

I have read on here the price of the book is between $9.00 and $14.00. I recently bought a new Chinese Breeze for 16RMB. I would definitely recommend this book and would like to read other books in this series (both at level 1 and higher levels). However, if they are going to be sold in China as a hard copy, they may need to lower the price to be more comparible with other textbooks and readers already available.

Overall, if you are looking for a Chinese reader then I would definitely recommend this one.

My Chinese level: I've not taken a HSK but spent two semesters studying at Tsinghua. I finished the pre-intermediate class. I've been studying with a tutor 1-on-1 since then, still living in China.

Thanks to "the book people" for giving me the chance to read this and review. I hope my comments are useful to people. Let me know if there are any questions.

[lechuan]

My review of the Kindle Version:

I finished reading this reader last week. It has been my first attempt at reading pinyin-less chinese story. I previously went through Heisig Volume 1, and a bit of Integrated Chinese 1, before tackling this. I knew quite a bit of the vocabulary in this book, but still learned a number of new words. There was a lot of value for me in linking up the correct characters with "pinyin only" vocabulary that I had previously learned. Reading through this story personally helped me to solidify the use of 地 (de) to connect a verb and a modifying adjective.

I think it was a good move on Mandarin Companion's part to choose from existing stories that have already proven to be interesting. This helps to keep interest when you're slogging through a new language. The also did an excellent job in localizing the story so that it felt authentically chinese and not a western translation.

Great production quality and illustrations. There was a lot of repitition, but not to the point of annoyance; it helped to reinforce a lot of the new vocabulary.

The ending seemed a bit out of place. Most of the story focused on the main character, but the last part of the book was closed with a secondary character. I haven't read the English version of the story, but it felt as if the main character had not been given any closure.

My only issues were the issues I have with most other readers as well. They assume that the user knows a certain amount of vocabulary, and then provides supplementary vocabulary that it thinks you don't know. Problem is, you don't know what the base vocabulary is that you're supposed to already know. I compiled/posted a Skritter list with the complete (472) vocabulary/phrases used in this book, which addressed the issue for me, but I believe Mandarin Companion has more official vocabulary lists planned for this and future readers, which will be great!

One advantage of Chinese Breeze is that includes an audio cd (well, at least the paper version does, The Kindle version does not). This doubles the value of the reader: Learn to read characters, and imitate after the narrator to practice pronunciation and intonation. Both iBooks and Kindle iOS app support embedded audio, which might be a worthy future update.

I really enjoyed the experience. I purchased the other available Mandarin Companion books and am currently reading through the 60-year dream. After that is the Monkey's Paw.

Highly Recommended.

Edit: These readers just got even better. All Set Learning just added pages to their Chinese grammar wiki to track all the grammar patterns used in the book: http://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Reference:Mandarin_Companion_Chinese_Graded_Readers

[lechuan]

Oops, I accidentally downvoted character's review. Can someone please upvote it to make up for my downvote? Thanks!