Review of Graded Chinese Reader 2: Selected Abridged Chinese Contemporary Short Stories by Shi Ji

[Hofmann]

This is a review of Graded Chinese Reader 2: Selected Abridged Chinese Contemporary Short Stories by Shi Ji (史跡, 2007). I received this as a participant in a giveaway.

 

tl;dr: Good appropriate material for intermediate reading comprehension practice. Character spacing makes reading unpleasant.

 

This book contains five abridged short stories from contemporary writers. The vocabulary is limited to about 3000 words (1033 from HSK level A and 2018 from HSK level B), and complex sentences are avoided. .mp3 files of these stories are included on a CD. Each story includes a guide to reading in English, Pinyin above each character, English definitions of more obscure words in the sidebar, notes about the author in English, and questions to check reading comprehension in Chinese.

 

The short stories are

 

《郎今船艙》 by 周大新

《不會變形的金剛》 by 畢淑敏

《訛詐》 by 梁曉聲

《遍地白花》 by 劉慶邦

《校園三曲》 by 謝競遠

 

I like how the preface is written in English and Chinese, and that the reading guides are written in English. This ensures that the readers have context for better reading comprehension, as noted in the preface. The English throughout is generally free of mechanical errors.

 

I read through 《遍地白花》. It was a bit irritating because of the character spacing (more on that later). It is available online, but I wanted to read it as it was in the book. The language seemed appropriate for the target audience without sounding distractingly constrained. Definitions of obscure words are given in an unintrusive way as sidenotes, so that one doesn't have to turn to a vocabulary list on another page. Although this was the only story I read, they should all decent. This book should not expand one's vocabulary significantly anyway, but mostly provide reading practice, as is its primary objective. Printing is clear and page layouts are tasteful.

 

I have scanned a typical page.

 

A slotted card is provided for obscuring the Pinyin rows:

 

One thing I don't like is how Pinyin spacing takes priority over Chinese spacing. This results in wide uneven spaces between each Chinese character. It makes me not want to read any of the other stories. I recommend two changes: (1) space Chinese characters normally, and write Pinyin smaller above it, condensed if necessary, and (2) eliminate spaces within a word in Pinyin. Below I have an example of what I'm talking about.

 

 

Also, there are some typographical and formatting errors that can be fixed by going over it with a copy editor. For example, all the apostrophes (’) in English are full-width, when they should be half width. Compare "one＇s" vs "one’s." There are also some typos in the main text, like 闵明 (as you can see in the scanned page) for 闵茗, and I saw several Pinyin typos as well, such as jiào for the 覺 in 感覺.

 

The .mp3's included on the CD are easily intelligible. There is a female reader and a male reader (who read different stories; not both for each story). Both would get 1A on the PSC. Reading speed is slower than usual, which can be good or bad depending on what you want. Recording quality, although adequate, sounds 30 years old. Also, it may be a good idea to make these available online, as optical drives get scarce.

[imron]

My suggestion would be 3) Have separate Chinese and pinyin paragraphs. As a learner, having the pinyin anywhere near the Chinese is distracting and while it makes it convenient to know the pronunciation of unknown words, the distraction it provides to the overall learning experience is not worth it.

Glad to see they at least provide a card to hide the pinyin.

[xuefang]

I have this book as well and just like imron above, I would suggest them separating the pinyin and the characters. In the book I have the card to hide pinyin didn't have the same lines as the lines in the book, so when you only saw characters on top of the page, you could only see pinyin in the bottom half of the page. But according to the picture this seems to have been fixed.

[Iso]

I suggest to remove the pinyin entirely. The vocabulary in Graded Chinese Reader 2 is not intended for beginners and I assume that everybody who's able to understand these stories is familiar with at least 95% of the characters used. They should keep pinyin only for Graded Chinese Reader 500 Words and Graded Chinese Reader 1000 Words.

 

And in my version of the book it's quite difficult to use the slotted card. It usually covers the first or last character (depending on the page), because it's hard to push it fully to the middle.

[li3wei1]

Yeah, I had both those problems, and eventually my card fell apart. I wouldn't ditch the pinyin entirely, but keep it somewhere where it won't distract your eyes, like the facing page or alternate paragraphs.

[Lu]

While I agree that printing it directly over the characters is distracting, putting it on the other page means you have to look for the word you want to check the pronunciation of, which takes you out of the story. Making the pinyin a lot smaller should fix the spacing problem and also should help in not looking at it unless you really want to.

[roddy]

Similar pinyin errors have been pointed out in Graded Reader 1 as well. 

[li3wei1]

If the pinyin were on the facing page, and matched the character text line for line, it would not take long to find the right word.

 

I'm starting to think the age of printed graded readers is over, as we just about have the technology necessary to turn any electronic text into a graded reader that matches a) our precise vocabulary of learned words, and b) our reading style (trad or simplified, pinyin or zhuyin or whatever, above or on the side, gloss every instance or just the first, etc.)

[Ania]

I also received this book as part of a giveaway on this forum (http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/44629-no-more-free-chinese-books-for-now) and even though it's waaay above my level, I promised that I would write a short review of what I have managed to do with the book so far...

 

Since it really is very difficult for me, I've only gone through a dozen or so pages from the first story, but I still think I can share some general imporessions regarding the book. 

 

First of all, I'm very grateful for the card to hide pinyin. I always keep saying that I don't mind pinyin (just to be on the safe side), but when you're reading a longer text, it can actually be quite distracting. The card helped a lot. Although I would have to agree that maybe having separate paragraphs/pages of characters and pinyin might not be such a bad idea. 

 

I think the learning guides are a great idea. They make it easier to follow the story and understand it a little bit better. I haven't read all of the stories yet, but I have read all of the reading guides  

 

I believe that a lot of effort goes into creating a graded reader, so kudos to everyone who prepared so much reading material for us students. 

 

I really wish I could write more, but at this point I really can't. I hope to one day reach the level that would allow me to read this graded reader more efficiently and then I will post a more detailed review!

 

I agree that with new technologies we are bound to have more and more graded readers in eletronic format or tools that will be able to create e-books for us at approproate levels based on vocabulary we already know plus a reasonable amount of new words. There are some tools that already do it to some extent, so it's just a matter of time before they are perfected and everyone can find something for themselves. 

[Hofmann]

One thing I forgot to mention, about the story I read, is how the main character is called 女畫家 throughout. That she's female doesn't seem to be that important in the story, so it seems too sexist/backward for the editors to not just give her a freaking name and say she's a 畫家. Now if they could just change all the 她 to 他 that would be great, but asking for too much from this generation.

[Johnny20270]

I have GCR 1 and its the same. The layout is just too distracting. Also the book spine is too rigid and takes a bit of fiddling to get that card in place so I just didn't bother.

 

Even at my baby level, I don't have any major need for pinyin. A phone and a OCR reader is all that's required but I guess when one character can have different pinyin such as 着 it may be confusing (or if you don't want to rely of technology!). Using a electronic reader means you can just add the word to your personal dictionary, flash card easily.  

 

If they want to include pinyin, I think they should have the pinyin on the next page, i.e. requiring you to turn the page over. If its on the same page or page opposite, you still have to cover that part up. To make the character easy to find, just subscript each paragraph or 3rd sentence. In any case I would argue that if you have to look at the pinyin very frequently or are trying hard to pinyin for the unknown word then the book is probably too hard for your level (i.e. you should easily be able to recognize the neighboring characters) 

 

 

One thing I would love to see in any graded reader is an English translation somewhere. I find that quite frustrating as I am never 100% sure the exact meaning of sentence.