I love bargains but not to the level of being a cheapskate, so I thought that a free way to learn Chinese would be great. The Chinese Wonderland e-books could be equated to an upcoming movie trailer teaser. The teaser is just to get you interest enough to look up the synopsis of the movie. Well that’s what I did and on my trying there were good things about the books but there were also the bad side.
The website is easy enough to navigate getting the links to the e-books is fairly easy. However when you click on the e-book, if you don’t have Microsoft Silverlight then you first have to download and install it and this takes sometime. You cannot open the pdf books in adobe reader, as this is not possible.
The free version are just extracts of approximately 10 to 12 pages, you would have to buy the full version online. The books preface and introduction are written in both Chinese and English. The page I was viewing showed that it was at 100 percent but the text was small making it difficult to read. The books do not have pinyin so if this is the first time learning Chinese these books are probably not the ideal books. The books have a cultural note, which is really nice, and it’s explained in English. The drawback of having only English is that for non-English speakers one would have to translate to your native language.
The Chinese Wonderland, Volume 1 is designed to include unit and lesson introduction; dialogue; vocabulary; sentence structure; classroom expressions; readings; culture notes; communicative and task-based activities and picture this. The book is designed for young learners but I found it applies to older learners as well. The concept and content of the books series comply with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and World Language Content Standards for California Public Schools.
Digital learning is a useful tool in learning and teaching Chinese. The Chinese Wonderland series is just one more addition to the wide range of the free trial chinese learning and teaching e-books.
Click here to take a look.
Screen grab of huayuan.com
