Learn Chinese with short stories

Stories to read in Chinese, with the English beside each paragraph. They open in the browser, with no account needed, and each one is also a free Chinese–English ebook for Kindle, Kobo or any e-reader: downloading needs a free account, no payment (which file to pick).

By level:

• Easy Chinese short stories with English translation (A1–A2) · 21 stories
• Intermediate Chinese short stories, side by side with English (B1–B2) · 5 stories

Every story here carries its level on the Common European Framework, from A1 for beginners to C1 and beyond, so the library works as a set of free Chinese graded readers: start at the level where you understand most of a page, and move up when the English beside it is something you check only now and then.

Chinese looks forbidding on the page, but its grammar is kind to readers: verbs never change for person or tense, and nouns have no gender and rarely mark the plural. Once you know a few hundred characters, short stories come within reach sooner than you might expect.

What slows readers down is the page itself: characters you have not met yet, no spaces between words, and small particles like 了 and 的 that shape the meaning of a whole sentence. With the English next to each paragraph, you always know what a sentence says, even before you can read every character in it.

For Chinese speakers, a parallel text is a way into books in English without stopping at every phrasal verb or idiom. Read the English and look across to the Chinese when a sentence doesn’t land.

It works for bilingual families too: one book, two languages on the same page, so a parent and a child can each follow in the language they read best.

Long out of copyright and easy to find as EPUBs. Any of them makes a good first Chinese–English parallel text:

• 呐喊, Lu Xun
• 西游记, Wu Cheng’en
• 聊斋志异, Pu Songling
• 沉沦, Yu Dafu

Or use a book you already own: the method works best with something you actually want to read. See how to read a parallel text to get the most from it.