Does anyone know the complete list of Graded Chinese Reader books?

[Friday]

I have a few of Shi Ji's books called the Graded Chinese Reader, but it is confusing as the author has released various versions with different numbering systems that are inconsistent. Does anyone know a complete list of the books in the series? I'd like to have all of them without duplicates.

[querido]

These were the titles when I bought them:

1. "GCR 500 Words"

2. "GCR 3" (1000 words)

3. "GCR 1500 Words"

4. "GCR 1" (2000 words)

5. "GCR 2500 Words"

6. "GCR 2" (3000 words)

 

Mercifully, GCR 3, 1, 2 have been reprinted with the consistent names "GCR 1000 Words", "GCR 2000 Words" and "GCR 3000 Words".

You can view them all here, e.g.: https://www.purpleculture.net/graded-chinese-reader-bs-660/

 

[DavyJonesLocker]

Do they all still have the pinyin above the Hanzi? The inclusion of Pinyin made it totally unreadable in my view. A poor decision, especially not give OCR on APPs are so readily available 

 

 

[querido]

Yes, they do.

There are many other graded readers to choose from if you don't like these.

[艾墨本]

 Before purchasing from this series, consider skimming this research paper: http://www.jamesloach.com/papers/readability.pdf

 

Thr conclusion will astound you!

 

no, jk. It finds that the “graded” aspect of GCR is inconsistent at best and simply incorrect at worst. It constrasts this with the Mandarin Companion series which does a much better job at grading the readers appropriately.

[mikelove]

FWIW, we also sell these as Pleco add-ons with no Pinyin. (though of course you can tap on words to look up the Pinyin)

 

(we are working on some other titles, and would love to sell Mandarin Companion too, but haven't yet come up with mutually satisfactory business terms) (though I do have some methodological disagreements with that paper)

[艾墨本]

37 minutes ago, mikelove said:

we are working on some other titles, and would love to sell Mandarin Companion too, but haven't yet come up with mutually satisfactory business terms) (though I do have some methodological disagreements with that paper)

 This I would love to hear more about. Seeing as OP’s question has largely been answered...

[DavyJonesLocker]

5 hours ago, mikelove said:

(we are working on some other titles, and would love to sell Mandarin Companion too, but haven't yet come up with mutually satisfactory business terms) (though I do have some methodological disagreements with that paper)

 

 

i think though the inclusion of  Mandarin companion series is not as necessary as the Graded Chinese Readers series, as Mandarin Companion provide an ebook type format. It is nice to use and has some graphics doted around the place.  Its very easy to use PLECO screen reader service  at the same time. Including it as a PLECO add-on would make it more integrated I admit, although if one is checking more than a few words per page the level is too high. 

 

Finally I think using ebooks or graded readers, whether PLECO or not a tablet is a lot easier to use. Looking at a phone for any period of time becomes quite tedious in my experience.

 

Mike, i assume if one has PLECO they can install the app on a tablet without needing to pay again, is that correct?

[mikelove]

6 hours ago, 艾墨本 said:

This I would love to hear more about. Seeing as OP’s question has largely been answered...

 

I wrote a bit about it in the thread discussing that paper:

 

Quote

Interesting, though I'm not sure I'd agree with his focus on lexical difficulty as the key to ease of reading - nowadays with popup dictionaries the disruption from looking up unknown words is quite low and our own anecdotal evidence at least suggests that people are comfortable with texts a good bit above their vocabulary level if they've got a popup dictionary to help them.

 

Also, in defense of the Sinolingua series: the most interesting thing about them to me is that they're adapted from actual contemporary Chinese writings rather than commissioned specifically for a graded reader. There are certainly benefits to each approach, but it's not unreasonable that the vocabulary level would be higher with something abridged from native-speaker-level writing - it's harder to replace a word in an existing text without losing something of its essence.

 

 

1 hour ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

i think though the inclusion of  Mandarin companion series is not as necessary as the Graded Chinese Readers series, as Mandarin Companion provide an ebook type format. It is nice to use and has some graphics doted around the place.  Its very easy to use PLECO screen reader service  at the same time. Including it as a PLECO add-on would make it more integrated I admit, although if one is checking more than a few words per page the level is too high. 

 

True, though due to technical limitations Screen Reader is only an option for Android users.

 

1 hour ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

Mike, i assume if one has PLECO they can install the app on a tablet without needing to pay again, is that correct?

 

Yes, assuming the tablet is compatible with Pleco. The one exception would be installing it on an iPad if you own Pleco on Android - we can move content (dictionaries, graded readers) in that direction, but due to Apple restrictions we can't move features (flashcards, document reader function, OCR, etc). We can sometimes refund Android purchases for people switching to iOS - or who want to get an iPad and transfer that iOS license back to Android - but it usually only works within 1 year and is never something we can 100% guarantee.

[DavyJonesLocker]

Thanks Mike, yes this would be Android phone to Android tablet. The Kindle app is more appropriate for graded readers than an actual Kindle in my view . 

Will buy a cheap tablet I think and have a look at the pleco included graded readers