Review: Cuentos de los Cien apellidos (百家姓)

[Silent]

Just received my book from the Free book thread. It's the Chinese-Spanish edition of 中国蒙学经典故事丛书---百家姓 ISBN:978-7-5138-0429-5. This thread is meant to discuss and review the book. As announced I expect it will be July before being able to spend an extensive amount of time with the book. I'll write up my experience by then. For now the first impressions.

 

The Package arrived in a solidly sealed bubble envelop with a newspaper wrapped around the book for extra protection. It was sealed quite tightly and with a fair bit of tape so  it was a bit of a challenge to get it out:) Then appears a simple but beautiful designed book. The book is printed on course paper with a smooth paper cover. Every section of the book starts with a grey pictures of a mythological (?) beast and in between every few pages there is a colorful drawing. 

 

The core of the book consists of 6 sections. Five of these sections tell something about the names of the 百家姓 where every sections has a different angle like origins, distinguished people, clan relations etc. The sixth section is the only part that is not bilingual, it contains the full text of 百家姓 with pinyin above it.

 

The book is Chinese-Spanish, but I think is also available in other languages. (Can't check yet as connection resets when I go to the Sinolingua website) Language switches per chapter, first in Chinese followed by the same chapter in Spanish. Personally I prefer reading this way provided the text is of a suitable level. If you need/prefer to peak to the translation for hints or make a direct comparison this is less handy. It is a book for real reading, there are no excercises, language points, vocabulary lists etc 

 

Overall first impression a beautiful book of decent quality that is made for reading rather then for study.

 

 

Edit: Added a few pictures.

 

[elina]

Thanks for the first impression review!

 

The book is Chinese-Spanish, but I think is also available in other languages. (Can't check yet as connection resets when I go to the Sinolingua website)

Yes, there’re also Italian, French, German, Korean, Japanese, English, Thai, Portugues, Russian and Arabic edition.

[fabiothebest]

Thanks, I thought there was only an English and a Spanish edition, instead Sinolingua did a great work and released the book also in other languages. I'm pleasantly surprised to see that there is also an Italian edition

[Silent]

I promised a further write up about the book after I spend some time with it. I did spend the time, but I feel it's a bit hard to really tell much more about it. The book (the Chinese and Spanish) are a little above my level. This makes it hard to make a real judgement about the quality of the stories. After a couple of reads alternating between Spanish and Chinese version and some peaking at the other language version during the read I do get most of the stories without additional dictionary. I think a very useful approach for people learning both Chinese and Spanish (or another

 

Though it's hard for me to make a quality judgement about the stories, the content is interesting enough. The stories all take an historical angle but the perspective differs. E.g. how/where the name got it's fame, historical people with that name, the link with minority people, anecdotes etc.