Just Friends?

Mandarin Companion Graded Readers Breakthrough Level

By: Jared Turner, John Pasden

Narrated by: Xiao Qing

Dapeng and Wendong are best friends attending the same college. When the beautiful Zixin arrives on campus, they soon discover they both share an interest in her. To preserve their friendship, they make a promise not to pursue her.

However, when Wendong sees Zixin going for a ride in Dapeng’s car, the truce dissolves into a battle between the two friends trying to gain the affection of Zixin.

Whom does she really like, or are they “just friends"?

Mandarin Companion is a series of easy-to-listen-to novels in Chinese that are fun to listen to and proven to accelerate language learning. Every book in the Mandarin Companion series is carefully written to use characters, words, and grammar that a learner is likely to know.

The breakthrough level is written using only 150 unique Chinese characters and is intended for Chinese learners who have obtained a low elementary or novice level of Chinese. Most learners will be able to approach this book after one year of traditional formal study, depending on the learner and program.

This level is designed to help learners begin to understand full-length texts in Chinese and combines simplicity of characters with an easy-to-understand storyline that helps beginners grow their vocabulary and language comprehension abilities.

©2020 Mandarin Companion (P)2020 Mandarin Companion

Good start

Great for shadow speaking and learning to recognize common characters at the same time. Speaker's voice is clear and easy to hear tones.

Great but monotonous

The story is great. The vocabulary is good to learn. The speaking speed is just right! However, the voice is very monotonous, even when characters are angry. A little more natural inflection, change of register would have made it more enjoyable. Some added sound effect would have made it an even more enjoyable of a listen and make it more of "enjoy listening to a great story" rather than "im just listening to this to learn.

Great Study Aid

I listened to this multiple times to get tones and pronunciation. Slow and easy to understand!

Clear pronunciation without any emotion

I bought this book to get some audio to go along with the actual book and to hear correct pronunciation while learning. Initially while listening to it slowly I didn’t notice this, but as I started speeding it up to conversational speed I realized that there’s no distinction between dialogues. No feeling behind the words. It’s difficult to follow. Angry words sound the same as happy ones. I doubt that this would be the case in reality. The story is interesting enough for its level. There may be some grammatical errors. I will need to consult a teacher on those. For example one sentence has both 是 and 很 in the sentence and I thought if you use the latter you drop the former, although as an early learner I am far from an expert.