Literature Recommendations for Beginner

[gougou]

I am getting bored with the laowai comes to China sort of 课文, and so, inspired by the ongoing dicsussions about Chinese literature, would like to read something real.

What (preferrably short) piece of Chinese literature would you recommend that at the same time has some importance and is easy to understand (meaning that I will only need a dictionary to read it, not a panel of native speakers.)

[Marco]

I totally agree with you , the text books can be extremely boring, I have to memorize these texts for my exams ( what’s the use of that any way) and I believe that almost every text has some kind of variation on the sentence 我的眼泪一下子涌了出来， or a topic related on 我爱我的父母

[skylee]

Here are some of the books I like which you can read on-line.

Read through the thread and you will find more suggestions ->

Chinese novels for laowais

PS - when reading books on-line, do note that there may be plenty of typing mistakes (wrong words). Since they are free of charge ...

[gato]

A collection of texts with difficulty ratings.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dporter/sampler/sampler.html

[gougou]

Thanks, skylee, for pointing out this thread, must have missed it somehow... Provides me with ample material!

[wushijiao]

I posted a similar topic a year ago:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/1626-chinese-novels-for-laowais&highlight=novels+laowais

In addition to what has been said, I have found that reading books based on cheesy soap operas and sitcoms are easier than other things. It's a starting place, at least. Here are two of the books that I read:

http://www.dangdang.com/product_detail/product_detail.asp?product_id=8781599

http://www.dangdang.com/product_detail/product_detail.asp?product_id=8756472

At the same time, I was listening to the very wonderful HSK 听力关键词 and 听力惯用语, which Roddy has a good review of somewhere. Those sitcom books used the slang vocab from those HSK books on almost every page.