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Mandarin books with English translations | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6550 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 1 of 4 21 October 2011 at 5:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Mandarin books with English translations – I would like suggestions for some books to buy while I’m here in
Beijing. Here are the requirements. Absolute requirements: 1) Originally written in Mandarin. In other words, an English book translated into Mandarin isn’t acceptable. 2) Has a translation in English. It’s acceptable if the English translation isn’t available in Beijing, as long as it is available in the US. 3) Is paper. Online, kindle, etc not acceptable. 4) Is a paperback. No hardbacks. 5) Easy to moderate difficulty. I can get through any of the Chinese Breeze readers pretty easily without looking anything up, but I realize I’m still a beginner. So, the easier the better. 6) Content. The book must have a happy ending, be generally up-beat, have good conquering evil, the guy getting the girl, etc. I prefer fiction. Adventure, mystery, romance, suspense. I don’t like poetry, war, politics, religion, horror. Absolutely no children’s books. No essays or collections of short stories. It must take place during modern times. I prefer books about things that could really happen, and deal mainly with real life situations, but don’t mind the occasional stretch of the imagination (for example, the matrix would be ok, but star wars wouldn’t). All this being said, I realize that any decent book is going to touch upon some of the things I don’t like, and that’s ok as long as the main theme isn’t one of those. 7) 100-600 pages long Not necessary, but would be nice: a) Mandarin audio b) parallel text format, for example, one page Mandarin, one page English c) occasional adult content d) pinyin, but only if it’s way off to the side or on a different page 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5173 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 2 of 4 21 October 2011 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Considering China's history (classical Chinese, Cultural Revolution) and your
preference for modern novels, you should be looking for works published after the Mao era. As such, I think you'll find it easier if you went through a list of books by some of the more prominent authors in the post-Mao era. Here are some authors mentioned on Wiki. You can find a list of their works (and their availability in other languages) under their personal links. I don't know how easily you'll be able to digest these books though. They weren't written with a person learning Chinese in mind. Edited by strikingstar on 21 October 2011 at 1:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cthulhu Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7223 days ago 139 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English, Mandarin, Russian | Message 3 of 4 21 October 2011 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not sure what you consider modern times, but my recommendation would be Family by Ba Jin (家 by 巴金). It's set during the 1920s, and while it does touch upon politics it mostly does so as a means of elaborating the personalities of the three brothers who are the main characters. It does have some depressing parts, and people do talk about their feelings a LOT, but the overall mood is triumphant and it does "have a happy ending, be generally up-beat, have good conquering evil, the guy getting the girl, etc". Mostly anyway.
Importantly, it's really one of the few (If not the only) native Chinese novels that I would describe as being of easy difficulty; Ba Jin's writing style is very clear and straightforward, and he doesn't use a lot of the obscure words that most Chinese authors love using. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6550 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 4 of 4 22 October 2011 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | ||
thanks 1 person has voted this message useful |
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