Expanded collection of Chinese audiotexts

[dporter1465]

When I was in Beijing last spring, I was inspired (with some help from the muse of procrastination) to put together a collection of short, accessible, and hopefully engaging mini-essays about various aspects of life in Beijing from the perspective of young Chinese residents of the city. All the essays have English summaries and mp3 audio, and they're graded in order of relative difficulty.

Based on the feedback I received then, I've recently made some additions and changes to the collection:

• I've added a bunch more pieces at the easiest level (95% of the characters are among the top 300 most commonly used) to make the collection more useful to early intermediate readers
  
• I've arranged the 65 essays by category, so it's easier to find pieces on topics you're interested in
  
• I've created an audiotext reader applet that lets you read and hear an essay at the same time, and click on characters/words you don't recognize to display their pinyin and meaning
  

The url for the Chinese Voices Project is http://www.clavisinica.com/voices.html . I hope people find it useful, and welcome comments and suggestions for further improvements.

[LaoZhang]

Wow, this is really great. Thanks for sharing.

[wrbt]

Great stuff, and exactly what many learners not living in China need. Students who know the grammar, can look up a word, but need practice hearing the words at a good pace so they can digest them as fast as they're spoken.