Customer Reviews

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Far Eastern Publications Series)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a good book for beginners and intermediate learners of the Chinese written language. Originally Pu Songling wrote these stories in Gu-wen (old Chinese), but the stories have been greatly simplified and rewritten in colloquial Chinese. There is an occasional typo: use of male "ta", ', when the subject is female, for example, is prevalent throughout the book, as is the use of ' "there" when the question word ' "where" is meant. These are usually easily correctable from context.

CAUTION: There is no translation of these stories to English or even Pinyin. The first half of the book is all 20 stories written in traditional characters, and the second half of the book consists of the exact same stories, only in simplified characters. You'll want to have a good Chinese dictionary next to you when you read. I recommend "Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary".

The layout of the book is very organized, so it's easy to flip from Traditional to Simplified and back.

The stories are Chinese fairy tales and ghost stories. Very charming.

The only things keeping me from giving this book 5 stars are the typos. But I finished this book and I feel my Chinese is stronger for it, so I recommend it highly to anyone who's interested.

It really surprised me that each one of the 20 stories had a very nice chinese illustration! The stories are totally different one to the other and the character have a good size and a nice typology. Besides, at the end of each story there is a vocabulary with the new words in english and yale pyinyin !
And using 600 characters! That is the Strange Stories From a
Chinese Studio: a chinese masterpiece.

The description states the language of the book is in English...but the stories are all in Chinese characters. Some of the words are translated at the end of each section, but unless you read Mandarin, you can't read the stories. From the description it sounds like the stories are both in English and Mandarin in their entirety...but they're not.