It’s done, all 4 hours of it, and uploaded to YouTube! Link is https://youtu.be/Ni3OCLmRHBE. Thanks to Junyou Chen for his terrific audio recording, as always.
Continue readingIf you’re reading our Last King of Shang series, you’ve probably noticed that Book 1 does not have poems at the beginning of each chapter, but Books 2 and 3 do. That’s our fault. When we wrote the first book, we just focused on retelling the story. But as we got deeper into the project, we decided that the poems were an important part of the story, so we included them in Books 2 and…
Continue readingMany of our readers ask for the vocabulary lists for our books. They’re available on the home page, just look for the “Download Vocabulary List” link next to each book. For the Last King of Shang series, we have individual vocabulary lists for each of the 3 books published so far, and also a master list that covers all 3 books. Here are the download links: Last King of Shang, Book 1 – vocabulary list…
Continue readingGood news! We are happy to announce the arrival of the third book in our Last King of Shang series of graded readers. It covers the events in chapters 35 through 50 of the original epic Chinese novel Investiture of the Gods (封神榜 ). We have now covered half of the material in the original 100-chapter novel. Here is a short blurb from the back cover: In the waning days of the Shang dynasty in ancient China, an epic…
Continue readingWe now have four Chinese language audiobooks available on Audible.com. These books all have English language introductions, but the main body of the audiobooks is a word-for-word version of the Chinese books. Here are the four books, with links to their Audible.com listings, length, and purchase prices: Journey to the West in Easy Chinese (the complete novel, 36 hours 53 minutes), cost $16.99 or one Audible credit Learn to Read Chinese, Book 1 (four short…
Continue readingWe’re happy to announce our first full length book in English! It’s a translation and retelling of the first 50 chapters of the classic Chinese novel 封神榜, known in the west as The Investiture of the Gods. The Investiture of the Gods is one of the most famous novels in classic Chinese literature. It is a gripping tale of powerful gods, scheming mortals and epic battles, but it also explores the dilemma faced by loyal…
Continue readingAt last, the second book in our Last King of Shang series is finished and available for purchase! The title is, not surprisingly, The Last King of Shang, Book 2. It covers the events in chapters 18 through 34 of the original epic Chinese novel Investiture of the Gods. Here is a short blurb from the back cover: In ancient China, the Shang kingdom descends into chaos as Daji, the beautiful thousand year old fox…
Continue readingI promised that the second installment of The Last King of Shang would be out by end of August. We’re going to miss that target by a month. Here’s why. The book is pretty much written. But I decided that it would be fun to include the short introductory poem that the original author provided at the start of each chapter. We didn’t do that for Book 1, but we will do it for all…
Continue readingA couple of weeks ago, a reader contacted us and asked for the vocabulary list for Rise of the Monkey King, so she could load it into one of her language learning apps. That seemed like a neat idea. So we’ve added a new link, “Download Vocabulary List,” to most of our fiction books on the home page. Find the book you want, click the link, and you’ll be able to download the complete vocabulary…
Continue readingWe’ve been working on a new series of graded readers based on 封神榜 , commonly known as Investiture of the Gods. We just released the first of six volumes. One of our biggest challenges has been to find a high quality English translation to work from. Our writing process for 封神榜 and 西游记 (Journey to the West) has been for me (Jeff) to write the English version first, adapting the story to make sure that…
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