Tales & Traditions: For Intermediate Students (2) (Readings in Chinese Literature, 2)

by Yun Xiao

Just as children gain literacy in their native language by reading, learners of a foreign language must read large amounts of level-appropriate books and material to attain fluency in their target language. Tales and Traditions was specially created to help learners of Chinese achieve that goal, by collecting the most well-known works in the Chinese literary canon in a series of convenient supplementary readers. Perfect for pleasure reading outside of class, or class instruction, Tales and Traditions exposes students to a wealth of information essential for the development of cultural fluency in Chinese. This second volume for intermediate learners contains fables, literary quotations, stories of romance, myths, fantasies, and tales of traditional Chinese festivals. This series of readings will be especially welcomed as the AP Chinese Language and Culture exam requires knowledge of China s literary, cultural, and historical traditions.

251 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Steve Carroll · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really useful graded reader. I would put this one at somewhere above HSK4 level and somewhere below HSK5 level. Facing pages of Simplified on the left and Traditional on the right. English summaries as a cheat sheet in the back. no pinyin (which I thought was good as no opportunity for your eye to cheat.) The stories cover lots of famous legends that you need to know for Chinese cultural literacy with a major focus on origin stories for the holidays. Worth your time if you are prepping HSK5 as I am. looking forward to the next volume.

[John Osborne · Rating 4 out of 5]

DNF. It's too easy for me, and I feel at my level this just comes off as too repetitive. That said, I'd probably recommended it to someone newer to Chinese.

[mango · Rating 3.25 out of 5]

i just hate how every 'love story' is how a man who has nothing basically does nothing and then a woman falls in love with him and becomes his maid

[Jeremy Carman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a decent graded reader. They added in some multi page love stories, and mythic tales.

This book proved it's level from the previous book by matching to a higher level of vocabulary, and increasing the grammatical difficulty. It also forced the reader to read longer stories. In the first book, afaik no story went over one page. In this book most stories were a page and a half, and the last 5 or so were 2-3 pages each.