The Great Mandarin Reading Project
Purpose:
We invite you to join Chinese teachers and acquirers from around the world in this project! Together, we can make a small contribution toward solving two problems in the world of Chinese teaching and learning:
- Beginning Mandarin students don’t have enough to read, but books often cost a lot of money. Plus, there aren’t many books designed for non-native beginners.
- Mandarin teachers have a time-consuming and demanding job. We can help reduce the burden of preparing for our many classes by sharing reading material.
We share short reading selections that are easy to read (and hopefully also interesting). Nothing fancy: no publishers, no copyrighting. Chinese teachers may therefore use these readings in classes any way they wish. They can be written by teachers or by students (submitted after any editing by teachers). Teacher and student authors will get full credit.
Guidelines:
- Stories or short essays can be in any format: pinyin, traditional characters, simplified characters, or any combination of the above. However, please DO NOT submit reading that has characters with pinyin added directly above the characters. This website cannot handle that formatting.
- Provide English translation if you wish.
- There will be no editor, so no one will review the essays to see if they are “appropriate” in difficulty or topic.
- Include a title in English that tells the reader a little bit about what the story or essay is about. For example, a good title would be “Important Questions about Mickey, Minnie, and their friends“ and an unclear title would be “Questions.“
- Include a footnote which says, “The Great Mandarin Reading Project. All copyright is waived.“ Also please provide how to contribute to the project as listed in the footnote of this page.
- Readings should be in PDF format.
- Haiyun Lu will keep a collection on the “www.ignitechinese.org” website. Others are free to keep collections as well.
- Readings should include the authors’ name(s) unless they want to remain anonymous.
- All papers can be shared with anyone without asking permission of the author, but they cannot be used for commercial purposes. The authors should be given credit when you use their stories.
Helpful Links:
Chinese Reader Revolution: converts character-only text to pinyin.
Simplified to Traditional script convertor
Traditional to Simplified script convertor
Online pop-up Chinese-English dictionaries: Perapera Chinese and Zhongwen
Smart phone dictionary: Pleco
Project begun by Dr. Stephen Krashen, Haiyun Lu, Linda Li, Pu-mei Leng, Xiaoyan Wang and Diane Neubauer.
To contribute, please submit to either:
Diane Neubauer 杜雁子: questyn@hotmail.com
Haiyun Lu 卢海云: Haiyun@ignitechinese.org
On how to browse the Reading Corner: