Introducing Mandarin Companion

Ever since founding AllSet Learning in 2010, we’ve been steadily adding new products and expanding our mini-empire of resources. The Chinese Grammar Wiki was one of our most significant additions (and it’s growing nicely), and we also have two iPad apps out: AllSet Learning Pinyin and the Chinese Picture Book Reader. Last year, our expansion went in an all-new direction with our work on Mandarin Companion‘s brand new Chinese graded reader series.

If you follow me on Twitter you may have heard of Mandarin Companion already, but this is the first time I’m directly mentioning it on Sinosplice. I was waiting until all five of our Level 1 digital editions were released for both Amazon Kindle and iBooks, and now they are.

What is it and who’s it for?

Since I’ve gotten quite deep into extensive reading and graded readers over the past year, there’s a lot I could say here, but I’ll keep it simple in this post.

Mandarin Companion graded readers are for learners with 1-2 years of formal study under their belts (or the equivalent), looking for something longer and more interesting to read for pleasure, without having to constantly reference a dictionary.

Mandarin Companion’s Level 1 books assume a foundation of only 300 Chinese characters, and it’s 300 characters you will know if you’ve studied virtually any standard course.

To create this graded reader series, I’ve teamed up with a partner, Jared Turner, while also leveraging the tools and talent at AllSet Learning.

What are the titles?

We released five Level 1 stories in 2013, all based on western classics and adapted into Chinese stories (more on that in a future post). Here are the first five titles:

1. 
   The Secret Garden:《秘密花园》
   This was our first book, and it was an awesome choice. It’s an excellent story, free of complicated settings or plot twists. There are more characters in this story than in most of our other ones, but they all have easy (and very Chinese) names, and the story ends up feeling very Chinese itself, despite the British roots. (Just look at the cover!)
2. 
   The Sixty-Year Dream:《六十年的梦》
   You can’t tell from the name, but this graded reader is an adaptation of Rip Van Winkle. In adapting this and making it totally Chinese, we had a lot of issues to consider. The original work is about going to sleep as a colonist before the American revolution, and waking up afterward in a newly formed country. It’s a story about change. Well, what country knows change better than China? For maximum dramatic effect, we chose a 60-year time span, going from pre-Communist China to post-Mao China. The relevant Chinese history of the periods adds a lot of color to the story.
3. 
   The Monkey’s Paw:《猴爪》
   I remember reading this classic story as a kid, and it totally creeped me out. The first time you’re introduced to the idea of pre-determinism it kind of blows your mind, right? I initially had my doubts as to how well this story could be adapted into simple Chinese while preserving the feel, but we pulled it off pretty well, if I do say so myself.
4. 
   The Country of the Blind:《盲人国》
   This graded reader is based on a classic H.G. Wells story, and I actually blogged about it not long ago, in conjunction with China. (Now you know why I was thinking about the story so hard!) The text of the story doesn’t get into any of those details, really, though… I just wanted as close to an “adventure” story as we could do at the 300-character level (it really is a challenge), and this one fit the bill. The sci-fi connection was icing on the cake! This one is also notable because we altered the original ending just a little bit.
5. 
   Sherlock Holmes and the Red-Headed League:《卷发公司的案子》
   What if you adapted Sherlock Holmes to 1920’s Shanghai? Well, this what happens! This one was fun, because we had to research styles of the time to get the illustrations right, but actually none of that affected the text of the story itself. (But hey, details matter, right? Sherlock.. errr, 高明 would approve!) It was definitely a pleasure to create our own take on the world’s most famous sleuth.

I’m really proud of these books we’ve created, and I wish I had had material like this when I was just starting out on my journey of learning Chinese. You don’t have to wait until you can read a Chinese newspaper to enjoy reading Chinese, really.

Related Links

– Mandarin Companion: the official website (FaceBook, Twitter)
– Mandarin Companion graded reader grammar points: courtesy of the Chinese Grammar Wiki, of course
– Chinese Breeze: another graded reader you may be familiar with (comparisons are welcome!)
– Extensive reading (Wikipedia): good stuff here, including more on graded readers
– AllSet Learning Product Newsletter: we just did a promotion where we gave away iBook versions of these 5 books. Sign up if you’re interested!