First Chinese Reader for Beginners by Marina Chan

The book consists of Elementary and Pre-intermediate courses with parallel Chinese-English texts. The author maintains learners' motivation with funny stories about real life situations such as meeting people, studying, job searches, working etc. The method utilizes the natural human ability to remember words used in texts repeatedly and systematically. The author composed each sentence using only words explained in previous chapters. The second and the following chapters of the Elementary course have only about thirty new words each. Phonetic transcription Pinyin transcribes the sounds of Mandarin using the western (Roman) alphabet.

The book is equipped with the audio tracks. The address of the home page of the book on the Internet, where audio files are available for listening and downloading, is listed at the beginning of the book on the copyright page.

As you read a bilingual reader, your brain begins to remember words and phrases simply because you are exposed to them several times. You don’t even realize, until you must recall what you’ve learned, that you have already learned the new words and phrases. The graded language book with a parallel translation has helped many to uncover their potential for learning multiple languages. Whether you are learning a language as a hobby or for a necessary purpose, you will find such books are supportive.

It can usually take you from one to three months to finish a bilingual graded reader at beginner level (A1) and elementary level (A2). The amount of time depends on your previous experience with learning foreign languages and on your personal abilities. At this point you should be able to ask and answer simple questions with the following questioning words: What? Who? Where? When? Which? How many/much?

A good idea is to use the free VLC media player to control the playing speed. You can control the playing speed by decreasing or increasing the speed value on the button of the VLC media player's interface. Read and listen at the same time!