Chinese Stories for Language Learners: Elementary (Free Audio) - Bilingual book of folktales, idioms, fables, proverbs, myths and modern fun stories (Chinese Story Series)

Even as an intermediate learner, this book definitely helped with my Chinese learning. The book includes a wide variety of short stories from ancient proverbs, chengyu, folk tales, modern tales, etc. It's well structured, the illustrations add a positive mood to the reading experience, and the vocabulary is at the right level. Plus, the audio included with the book is at an appropriate pace and really conducive to listening practice.

I really wanted to keep it for myself, but I had bought this for my cousin, so she can enjoy the stories that I also grew up enjoying. I love simple children's language book. I find it is more interesting when written in those kinds of formats because it helps to relieve headaches given that there are too much to read anyway.

Las historias son preciosas. La calidad del papá le es muy buena. Es fácilmente de leer y las actividades luego de cada historia son muy útiles.

This exceptional series of books is an absolute must-have for anyone truly dedicated to mastering the Chinese language. With engaging and thrilling storylines that are both concise and clear, listeners will find themselves captivated and eager to listen again and again. The expertise and passion of the brilliant Teacher Ling Ling shines through in every word, making this an unparalleled resource for Chinese language learners everywhere. Don't miss out on this extraordinary opportunity to elevate your Chinese language skills to the next level!

The book contains 25 stories, adding up to 51 minutes of audio.The stories are fun and generally easy to read. For an elementary-level book, though, they do contain quite a few uncommon words. Some of these are required to tell the story, but many are HSK 6 or HSK 7-9 words that could have easily been replaced with words from lower HSK levels.There is a small glossary following each story, but strangely enough, the hardest words are often not in the glossaries. To get the meanings for these, you have to read the English translation, where hard words often appear in bold type in both the Chinese and English, so you can match them up. Yes, this system works, but by having to read the English translation to find the meanings of the hardest words, I am deprived of the opportunity to try to figure out the Chinese on my own. Yes, I could just go straight to the Chinese-only version and look up all the hard words in a dictionary, but then what is the point of having a book to help make learning easier?Each story is printed twice, once with just the Chinese characters, and once with Chinese characters, pinyin and English translation together on each line. Here I would have preferred to have the English translation printed elsewhere. I constantly found myself trying to cover up each English line so that I could try to figure out the Chinese without having the answers staring me there in the face.For each story, there is a short passage in English describing some of the Chinese culture behind it, as well as explanations for a couple of sentence patterns used in the story. These are very nice to have.There are two people reading the stories, one woman and one man. They do a professional job, and the sound quality is very good. I'm being nitpicky here, but the reading was a little bit slow at times, with a few pauses interrupting phrases that would be better understood if read in one go.So there are a few things that could have been improved, but overall, I do recommend the book. It's visually appealing and enjoyable to read. And the audio is good for practicing your listening skills and reviewing what you've read.

Diola Garcia here. I am making my way thru this book with the help of a tutor. The audio recordings help prepare me. I appreciate the vocabulary development, sentence pattern introduction, and story theme variety. Great resource! Can’t wait to finish it and get on the intermediate stories! You are the best for providing these study materials for Chinese language students!

I follow Ling Ling's videos on YouTube to learn Chinese. This book has similar helpful stories with Mandarin characters, pinyin, and the English translations. The audio component, where the stories are read by native speakers, is a fantastic (free) add-on.

I just received my book today. 我很高兴! The book follows the Format of Ling Ling's previous books, which I really like because I'm already familiarize with it. I love that the book includes Chinese Folk Tales, Idioms, Fables, Proverbs. I love the Culture Corner section. This book it's so complete for Beginner lerners as it includes the Audio with native speakers, pinyin and the English translation. I also love the cover design and the illustrations inside the book. I totally recommend it!