Mandarin Companion Graded Readers: Breakthrough Level
For the past several months, my kids have been enjoying books from all levels of this series as part of their required daily Chinese studies. I’ve been sticking with my own daily lessons via Duolingo, but I’ve long since realized that the app just isn’t enough to bring me back to a level of moderate fluency. Now that I’m (mostly) done with school, I feel like I can start creeping back into the habit of study, and these books are awesome for resharpening my rusty language tools.
The Breakthrough Level of the Mandarin Companion readers include 10 chapters made up of just 150 characters. That may seem like a lot to an outsider, but I assure you, it’s not! Try writing a 10-chapter novella in English with just 150 unique words, and you’ll soon realize how constricting that is! Yet co-authors John Pasden and Jared Turner do a marvelous job at this in Chinese, and they deserve their kudos. (Wait…they deserve their “bitter beans”? That can’t be right!)
Rather than being a collection of short adventures as we saw in The Misadventure of Haisheng, this book is instead one long story about a boy from ShanXi province who gets lost while looking for flowers in the mountains, finding himself strangely on the coast of Hainan Island, hundreds of miles away. He’s been challenged by an old woman to search for “Hua Ma,” the flower horse, and the boy has no idea what that means.
Because I read my first book quietly to myself and realized that I wasn’t getting much Chinese practice out of it, I decided to read this one aloud. And on an opportune day when my wife was away at a conference and my kids were asking what they were supposed to do for Chinese study, I told them: “You can be my teachers! I’ll read 5 chapters aloud to each of you. You follow along and correct me when I make a mistake.” They loved the idea, and it went swimmingly. I had to make up some mistakes along the way, since this was a fairly easy read for me, but it was an effective day’s worth of study and my kids did pretty well at tracking me.
While my own fluency level in reading Mandarin Chinese isn’t up to snuff (I read quite slowly at times), I knew every character in this book and understood every line, so that’s gotta count for something! And as I read this one aloud to the kids, I was even able to speak Chinese with different accents and voices, which was a fun challenge. They especially loved my Hainan accent—though I’m pretty sure my wife would not have appreciated it.
All told, this was a great book and a great story with a slight twist at the end. I look forward to reading everything available in the Breakthrough Level before graduating up to Level 1 and beyond, seeing how far my current Chinese level will take me. For any “foreigner” who can speak the language but wants to read it better, I highly recommend this series. It’s the best option out there, in my opinion, and well worth the cost (at least on Kindle).
©2023 E.T.