Intermediate | Chinese Reading Practice

28May, 2014

Desk-chairs of the Future

This post kicks ass, if I do say so myself. This kid was asked to imagine the perfect desk-chair of the future – what it would look like, and what it would do – and boy, does he ever. The chair turns into all kinds of utopian machinery. It flies, it helps you sleep, and it carries your books to school. Sentence structure is pretty easy and the language is solidly intermediate, with very little advanced vocab (one idiom, a couple of advanced words but not much). At six paragraphs, the text is a bit long, though.

Little Bear’s Beautiful Dream

Intermediate

Been a couple of months since I tossed a post out there – the latter half of 2013 was a bit of a shake-up, so please forgive the lapse. In other news, I can’t get my favorite Chinese story website, tom61.com, to load anymore, #sadface. Fingers crossed that’s a temporary glitch, but if not, I’ll mourn the loss of a fantastic learner’s website.

The Silent Dog

Welp, I swore I would never do this again but I found this (and several other short stories) in Hainan Airlines’ in-flight magazine (I’m in Prague!) and couldn’t resist typing it up (as opposed to copy-pasting from an online source). I’ve checked and checked for typos, but I’m not always the best at that, so if you run across one, please comment.

This is one of those reads where the sentence structure is basic and in parts very repetitive, but quite a few advanced words are used – “advanced” only because they’re not used often in casual conversation, like parts of an animal (hooves, horns, etc.) So beginners, you can give this a go if you’re feeling very patient but you’ll be looking up every other word in some paragraphs even though you will be able to predict generally what the next few sentences are about.

Papa, Please Don’t Smoke!

In this essay, a child desperately (and very angrily) pleads their father not to smoke. Though this is classified as “Intermediate”, beginners should definitely try this read, leaning heavily on the hover word-list. The difficult parts are the mid-level turns of phrase, which are all explained below.

Guest Post by Rebecca Chua: The difference between life’s exam and exam papers

Learn to read Chinese free: Simplified Chinese character exercises - Guest Post by Rebecca Chua: The difference between life’s exam and exam papers

Well well well, lookie here. A guest post! Today we’ll be reading Rebecca Chua’s (Chinese name: 蔡幸彤) translation of an essay from her textbook. The post is about the rewards of honesty. I remember my own textbook being full of these types of essays, so thank you, Rebecca, for the traditional read.