《万物解释者》 (Chinese version of "Thing Explainer")

[Demonic_Duck]

For intermediate learners and fans of extensive reading, constrained writing, graded readers, and/or pop science.

The original (English) version is by the guy who does xkcd, with the premise of explaining complex things using only the 1000 most common English words. Unfortunately the Chinese version doesn't go for the obvious choice of the most common 1000 Chinese characters (which would actually already be less restrictive than 1000 English words), but according to a third-party source, it does restrict itself to characters a Chinese third-grader would be expected to know.

Anyhow, the simplified Chinese version is available online on Taobao et al and in bricks-and-mortar stores in mainland China. Not sure if a traditional version is available yet or not.

[kangrepublic]

Nice, I have the English one, but now I want this one too.

[艾墨本]

This is awesome. Unfortunately, no ebook version that I can find :-(

[werewitt]

.

[Wurstmann]

Thanks for the recommendation. I bought it off of taobao. It's really nice.

[werewitt]

Curious, now that you have it, is it really 3-rd grader vocabulary? From the Internets, 3-rd grader is equivalent of HSK4-5.

[Wurstmann]

I haven't read it yet, only skimmed through it. 

I didn't come across any unknown words so the estimate seems to be correct.

The sentence structure and grammar is really easy. 

 

For example:

叶子

树叶把阳光转化成能量。叶子里的绿东西吃掉阳光（和我们呼气时吐出去的气体），

把它变成能量（和我们吸气时吸进去的气体）。