Mandarin Companion has none of this so it’s a big plus! It’s easier to absorb common people names like Li Ye or Zhou Haisheng or Chen Fang compared to Chinese Mythological figures.

One big problem I personally have is that I arrive at a lower intermediate stage where I have very good character recognition and good reading speed, to the point I can read a page of Mandarin Companion level 2 and some 600 character levels graded reader and recognize all of the characters and their meanings but I can’t sound them out. I know what a character means, what the word means precisely, and what the sentence means accurately, but I can’t sound out the words. I can’t read them aloud fluently. I can speak more easily than I can read aloud a written page despite the page is very easy for me to understand as I recognize the character. I can’t make the connection between the written characters and sound, but I can understand what’s said to me pretty easily by my teacher and my parents.

Do you (or anyone else) have any suggestions on how to tackle this, please? I’m thinking of trying reading the same level of text but with Pinyin on it, or should I try listening to Audiobook along with looking at the text at the same time?

Oh, that’s great! One thing I would do differently if I learnt Mandarin again is to focus much more on listening early on. These books will help other people to do that, which is partly why I think the audio is so important. I realise that it probably doesn’t sell as well as the books do, but in my opinion, they are at least half the value of the product, possibly more.

Thanks for reviewing these. I’ve never read The Secret Garden, but always wanted to. But I’m a big fan of Sherlock Holmes and lots of H.G. Wells, too.

I’ve only been studying Mandarin for a month, very casually, but I’m reading a lot about the language and gathering a variety of resources. These ebooks and audio books will be mine right next to your book too. 🙂

This is a very broad question and I wasn’t referring to any particular research. There’s plenty of research about incidental learning, which relies on understanding almost everything in a text. It was a while ago I looked into this, but a search for “incidental language learning” on Google Scholar will give you plenty of things to read, along with “extensive reading”. It’ snot a clear-cut case where extensive reading is several times better than intensive reading, it’s just that everybody already does intensive reading, hence the need to promote extensive reading! I can probably dig out more specific articles, but not from here and not now. Hope this gets you started at least!

Olle, can you point out to the research you are inferring this claim from?

Its evident the authors put a lot of effort to ensure the story and language flows. The choice of language used (noting its strict limitations) does indeed sound very natural and I like the subtle introduction of basic grammar points such as 不是 … 是. The select choice of cartoon style pictures judiciously placed in the text does break it up, a quick glance reinforces what you have just read.

I suppose they could add a few explanations points at the end of it, some sentences are not so “beginner level”. Coincidentally the only sentence where i had to have a second look was as you noted Ollie was the ..很奇怪. Also some words appear to be over-used like 一直. However, I am just being pedantic, not a concern at all. The lack of audio is a touch disappointing. Even mp3 downloads from their website read by a native speaker would be beneficial.

My fear is, as with the Chinese Breeze series the authors may lose interest in writing a level 3 or 4 book. It would be an ideal companion to their excellent Grammar Wiki!

Overall, one of the best non-textbook style material for learning Chinese I have seen.

@John (if you read this):
I think it would be very sensible to write just one level 3 and 4 book rather that trying to complete all books in that level. That way, you and your colleagues can gauge the response, feedback from readers whilst at the same time, lower intermediate students have some useful material. 🙂

Hi John,

Regarding your comment “It’s the closest we can get to sci-fi at Level 1. But I’m certainly not giving up on sci-fi at higher levels!” – any plans to release any higher level graded readers any time soon?

Cheers,
Benson