Simple Chinese Characters And Pinyin

I have read through about half this book now. I have taken two semesters of Mandarin at my college so i haven't had trouble with any of the grammar thus far, but it has used a good amount of vocabulary i haven't been exposed to. It does repeat the vocabulary a lot, which is good to help remember it. I enjoy the story from what i have read, but it would be compared to reading somewhere around a 3rd grade English book so dont feel like a fluent Mandarin speaker after reading the book heh heh. Its a great book for beginning Mandarin learners and i would recommend it to others. Just wish i could find the others in this series.


I liked the structure. The pinyin is on the page following the characters, not above each character, so it reduces the temptation to rely on pinyin. The dictionary at the back of the book is fairly complete, although oddly, some easy words are included and some hard words not.

The content is about as interesting as is possible for this type of book. The girl in the story has conflict at home that is resolved as she matures, i.e. character development. The story also provides a slice of life in Taiwan.

So this book about and for juveniles was helpful for even an old guy like me.