People's Education Press

[Ruben von Zwack]

[Admin Note]Split out from discussion here.

 

Querido - how nice, Madame Curie, no? Where did you get this? Is it part of the Chinese language curriculum, or history or science curriculum?

[querido]

To Ruben von Zwack:

Yes. It's from the language series People's Education Press Yuwen. Another series which I actually studied most was much worse with regard to the little animals and flowers problem; PEP Yuwen gets interesting and worthwhile very quickly... if you have the slightest tolerance for the occasional beautiful poem, fairy tale or legend.

Edit: It looks like I was saying the same things wrt graded reading two and a half years ago, e.g.:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/34829-vocab-list-for-childrens-material/#comment-259193

For links to the freely viewable texts, readers and writing books see two posts below.

Here is a description of the optional courseware (not free):

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/26617-pep-yuwen-courseware/?hl=yuwen

Although the books could be read for free (at that time?) I wanted to buy them. They were dirt-cheap except for the shipping.If I remember right, the freely viewable texts did not show the illustrations, which I myself found hauntingly beautiful; that's why I had to buy them! :-)

As you can see from those threads, there was very little interest in what I saw as a giant graded-vocabulary library, and free!

Here is a link to a video in my Dropbox public folder. It's one lesson from first grade. There are 62 such first grade videos with a total playing time of 1:13. How anyone - at that level - could resist this, I don't know:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3840623/1s-10.mp4

(Of course, it plays full-screen on my computer. Also, I produced that for an iTouch so it might be compressed some.)

[ChTTay]

"People's Education Press Yuwen"

Where would one buy these? I searched Amazon China (in English) but no hits.

[querido]

To ChTTAy:

I can't find it for sale right now, maybe because it's free.

I bought it from studychineseculture.com (but she might have regretted extending this service to me because I bought three or four full sets, and it added up to a lot of weight and bother).

They're still freely viewable, with illustrations! Here they are, through 6th grade!

Here are the textbooks:

http://www.pep.com.cn/xiaoyu/jiaoshi/tbjx/kbjiaocai/

Here are the coordinated readers 同步阅读:

http://www.pep.com.cn/xiaoyu/jiaoshi/tbjx/yuedu/

Here are the writing practice books:

http://www.pep.com.cn/xiaoyu/jiaoshi/tbjx/xzjc/

There are other coordinated components of the series there that I don't remember seeing before.

This series continues through the ninth grade and must be quite mature by then.

The vocab lists are at the back of each text.

I also have ALL of the above saved page-by-page . Nice, pumped up on my monitor. Sorry I can't share it with you. :-)

[laurenth]

Querido, it gets even better. I followed the links you suggested and opened a text randomly (6th grade "只有一个地球", here). I thought: Too bad this text is presented as an image. So, on a whim, I typed a sentence of that text in a search engine and, bingo, the text seems to be available on a variety of other sites.

 

This version, e.g., is mostly identical.

 

So the xiaoxue.hujiang.com site may have other interesting texts in a (in my opinion) more user-friendly format. I don't have the time to check right now, but it might be worth the effort.

 

Edit: Looks like the text about Marie Curie is also featured: link.

[querido]

Oh, laurenth, that's helpful!

Hey, my avatar is holding 1st grade volume 1. :-)

[Ania]

Here are the textbooks:

http://www.pep.com.cn/xiaoyu/jiaoshi/tbjx/kbjiaocai/

 

querido, thanks so much for those useful links!! I think I might take a look at those in a while I wish there was a text version available, but at least some of them still have pinyin  

[Silent]

 

Where would one buy these? I searched Amazon China (in English) but no hits.

If you want the physical books you can get 24 for 180 元。 See: http://www.amazon.cn/%E4%BA%BA%E6%95%99%E7%89%88%E5%B0%8F%E5%AD%A6%E8%AF%AD%E6%96%87-%E6%95%B0%E5%AD%A6%E5%85%A8%E5%A5%97%E8%AF%BE%E6%9C%AC%E6%95%99%E6%9D%90%E6%95%99%E7%A7%91%E4%B9%A6-%E4%B8%8A%E4%B8%8B%E5%86%8C%E5%85%A8%E5%A5%97-24%E6%9C%AC-%E5%8D%A2%E6%B1%9F-%E5%B4%94%E5%B3%A6/dp/B00CV41BKG/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1391537637&sr=8-3&keywords=%E5%B0%8F%E5%AD%A6%E8%AF%AD%E6%96%87%E8%AF%BE%E6%9C%AC

 

You may also search on amazon.cn for 小学语文课本 which turns up the above, several of the individual books and other books that look like they're of comparable level. Alternatively, amazon.cn has graded categories you could browse. e.g. search for: 小学 and pick a category on the left.

 

The problem with amazon.cn is however the excessive fees for postage (110元 per book in my case) if you're outside of China.  As a result I've never bought from them. I never asked, but I suspect that if you contact http://www.studychineseculture.com/ a deal can be made. In the past they offered that if you have a request for a book they will try to get it for you. Or of course through another Chinese contact.

[querido]

In the past I used the "buying agent" BuyChina.com, once, successfully.

When I search on 小学语文课本 at that site I see them there too.

That site is very slow at the moment.

[Ruben von Zwack]

If any of you want to do a collective reading of one of these, please make a topic. It was fun reading Meng Lelan's short story. On my own, I am so indecisive where to start that most of the time I end up doing nothing or something completely different.

[Rufus]

Thanks for sharing this Querido. Very interesting. My son attends 1st grade at a local Chinese school in Shanghai but their books are a bit different. They are put out by the Shanghai Dept of Education and I wonder if these books are more of a national curriculum. I looked through them and there are a lot of similarities but with a few differences in stories. I tried to find a good picture of the book but here is the best one I could find (textbook on the left)

[laurenth]

For those who'd rather use an electronic format, after poking around a bit, I believe the electronic versions of all textbooks mentioned by Querido can be found here.

 

For instance, the third grade, first part, (三年级上册)  is here  (note the initials in the url)

 

Once in the table of contents, look for 课文原文 and you can open an electronic version. Looks like there are mp3 versions too.

 

As far as I can see, the "coordinated  readers" are provided in an electronic format on the original site mentioned by Querido.

[Kelby]

These are the same books my students use

Also, my girlfriend is so ticked that I'm now using online versions of her primary school textbooks for practice

[elina]

 

I bought it from studychineseculture.com (but she might have regretted extending this service to me because I bought three or four full sets, and it added up to a lot of weight and bother).

No, I did not regret, providing satisfied service to our customers makes us feel happy, I just a bit worried at that time and was afraid of the books sold out in the market, because these books are not always available all the year, both in the stock from the publisher and from other books suppliers.

 

 

I never asked, but I suspect that if you contact http://www.studychineseculture.com/ a deal can be made. In the past they offered that if you have a request for a book they will try to get it for you.

Yes, as mentioned on our site, we could search any book published in mainland China for our customers, if the book isn’t sold out, without any extra fee, i.e. we would sell it according to the book’s original price.

[querido]

To Elina:

Now I remember. You had to go around the city to find them all. I'm sorry you had to do that! :-( Thank you! :-)

[elina]

You’re welcome, I’m glad we can do that to have succeeded in carrying out the assignment

[Silent]

 

Yes, as mentioned on our site, we could search any book published in mainland China for our customers, if the book isn’t sold out, without any extra fee, i.e. we would sell it according to the book’s original price.

Good to know! It doesn't really belong in this thread, but you remark about 'original price' makes me curious. Has China fixed book prices that resellers have to charge? If not, how could I know what the 'original price' is?

[imron]

All books in China come with a RRP printed on the cover of the book.

[elina]

Yes, on back cover of every book, there’s a 定价 (see the picture, 定价:25.00元), which was printed by the publishers, I meant that the original price, since I found quite a number of overseas sites sell books higher than the original price.