Child books for Newbies

shenmen

July 17, 2008, 12:56 PM posted in General Discussion

Hello all,

Ken Carroll mentions often that it would be a very good idea to learn from children books. This is exactly right - my daughter 3 years old learn that way :-) I tried very hard to buy some chinese children books here in GERMANY (that is where I come from; near Frankfurt). No luck so far.

Can anyone provide me with a store or internet source where I can buy some children books? So I can progress my chinese skills in a "childish" way :-) May be there are some (free) ebooks?

Thanks a lot - greetings to C-Pod - I really enjoy this learning expierence. Keep up the good work.

Lorenz

hajaralkhaled

July 17, 2008, 01:55 PM

Hallo Lorenz,

Do they have to be in German or would English do as well?

You can find several books with stories for children, colourful dictionaries and even audio-book on amazon.de or (wenn Sie etwas nicht unbedingt auf Rechnung bestellen müssen) amazon.com. Simply enter "chinese children's book" or "Veronique Tadjo" (who has co-authored several bilingual books for kids), but the explanations and annotations are in English.

I found some good links a while ago but I'll have to browse through hundreds of favourites, haben Sie bitte etwas Geduld ;-)

I hope I haven't butchered the German language too much, es ist schon ein Weil her das ich es gelernt habe.

-Hajar-

shenmen

July 17, 2008, 03:04 PM

Super! Your German is ausgezeichnet :-)

I look for english-chinese or german chinese.

Even ONLY chinese would be great. Do chinese mothers read stories before there child goes to bed or is this a german think. I read every night a story to my kid.

Can you suggest a book?

Thanks,

Lorenz

user76423

July 17, 2008, 05:15 PM

If you are looking for simplified Chinese children books:

Click

Traditional Chinese is a bit hard to get in Germany - I would order in Taiwan:

Click (slow)

hajaralkhaled

July 17, 2008, 07:54 PM

A book I can recommend (it's not per se a children's book, but it's rather simplistic and contains funny stories) is this one. Each text appears twice, once in characters and once in Pinyin. In additon to that, there are vocab annotations and questions to practise your reading comprehension.

If the payment method is not issue for you, you have plenty of choice, just go for the online shops designed for Chinese abroad. I don't think the quality of the books varies a lot. http://www.asianparent.com/ and http://www.betterchinese.com/ are good resources.

By the way, I think some evenings schools (Volkshochschule) offer Chinese classes for kids, if you accompany your daughter, both of you could improve your Mandarin.

There's a TV programme Ni Hao, Kai-Lan designed for children learning Chinese, you can find the episodes on YouTube. I bring myself to sit through one of them, but my cousin loves it.

WillBuckingham

January 14, 2009, 04:37 PM

A belated reply, but it might be of use to someone.

In the UK, Grant and Cutler have quite a lot of books in Chinese, including some Mandarin and English/Mandarin books for children. I've just got my simplified Chinese verison of Tintin goes to the Moon from them. I think they should ship to Germany.

Will