Hi everyone, Jason here from Yoyo Chinese, and today I have some really awesome
news to share with you guys: we just released issues four, five, and six in the
Chinese Character Reader series and, of course, to go along with that we also
released levels four, five, and six from the Character Reader Course, so both the
physical books and the digital course are now available! You can go to
Amazon.com to buy the physical books and go to our website YoyoChinese.com of
course to start learning the course that way as well. So you might be wondering
"What is this Chinese Character Reader Course?" well the Chinese Character Reader
Course is our newest course at Yoyo Chinese and the first three levels of
the course came out earlier this year. What's unique about this course though
is that for the first time we also released a physical component the three
character reader books you can see behind me to go along with the online
course, so not only can you go online and learn there, you can also take the course
offline and read it in the real world. You might be wondering like, "How does
this work? Do I need the comic books and the course? Can I just get the comic
books? Can I just get the course?" Well the cool thing about this course is that you
can kind of do either/or. The readers are great on their own, they
have complete stories with tons of cool notes in the back that I'll talk about
in a second that explain everything and help you learn. But the online course has
basically everything else you would want from a Yoyo Chinese course: it has audio
recorded by professional voice actors and quizzes and flashcards and all that
great stuff that comes along with an online course. So if you have the books
and the course it's great it works really well together but if you just buy
the books you can read those too and you just study online you can do that as
well. Okay so first let's talk about the
physical component the Chinese character readers series. For these books we wrote
and illustrated six original comic book stories called Zhang Ming's story, parts one
through six that puts you into the life of a regular Chinese office
a guy named Zhang Ming, and we throw in some drama like a crush on a co-worker,
pressure from this family, there's some arranged dates, traveling, eating barbecue
with friends... basically a kind of slice of life of this typical Chinese guy and
his friends and family, so that not only are you entertained and want to continue
reading and studying but you're also ending up with really practical useful
language. Unlike a lot of other readers that focus more on narrative stories, we
wanted to use practical spoken language that you could go outside and use today.
So speaking of which, the actual Chinese characters we use in the Chinese
character reader series all come from almost all come from our Chinese
Character Course I and Chinese Character Course II, so in those courses you learn
300 characters in the first course, 300 characters in the second course and end
up with 600 characters, and what you can do is then take those characters and
study the Chinese Character Reader Course, where almost all the characters
you've been using are now applied in this real story. So you don't necessarily
need to have studied those courses to do books or do the Character Reader Course
but it definitely helps and it's a very satisfying way to continue your study of
the character courses. So the first half of each book is the story itself. Our
illustrator Yahui did an excellent job on the illustrations, we think you'll
agree ,so definitely check those out. It's full color, very vibrant, and completely
in Chinese. We did this on purpose as an extra challenge, but also just so that
you wouldn't rely on the pinyin while reading. But speaking of which, the second
half of each book has a complete transcription of the entire story in
characters and pinyin as well as an English translation. So in case you're
not understanding what's going on in the story that's always there for reference
and we also have a ton of these great academic notes that our academic team
and Ashley worked on to basically provide extra context and extra deep
insight into some of the more confusing lines or maybe some of the scenarios
that require a little bit context. So as you can see the the
stories actually work really well on their own the books are completely
readable without the online course because you have all the notes in the
back and the translation and everything like that.
All right so the online course basically takes these stories and turns them into
video lessons just like we already have on our website. Every two pages of each
book is an animated motion comic video lesson, so not only do you get the same
story with the same illustrations, you get audio voice acting for every single
line from professional voice actors that do a really good job of adding this kind
of dramatic feel to it and turning it into almost like a cartoon. And you also
get all the great features that come along with learning a lesson on our
website, so you have flashcards with audio for both slow speed and regular
speed, you have dialogue replay which gives you all the dialogue from the
lessons - but also we recorded our own slow speed version of that dialogue so
that in case the the natural speed is too fast you can listen to the slow
speed and practice it that way. And then of course there's a 10 question quiz for
every single lesson as well, so after you've read two pages you can really dig
in and master all of the language with the flashcards in the dialogue replay,
and then take a quiz and make sure that you understand and comprehend everything
from the story that you just read. What's cool too is that we added some questions
and the quizzes that are unlike our other courses in that they are asking
you about the content of the story so to really test your ability to comprehend
what you're reading rather than just being about the language. So we really
think you'll enjoy that and this is a fantastic way to study these stories and
to learn from these stories because you're getting it in every way listening
reading and practicing and comprehension and all that good stuff. But like I said
before ,we really think the best way to experience these is together into one
package so you can keep the books on your shelf and whenever you don't feel
like being in front of your computer sit back read the books enjoy them that
way, but whenever you really want to dig in and practice
learn and listen to some audio and watch something you can go on your computer or
your phone and learn the course that way. Alright so that's pretty much it! That's
the Chinese Character Reader Course - we're super excited to finally complete
it and release books and levels 4, 5 & 6. If you want to check out the books go to
Amazon.com and if you want to check out the course go to YoyoChinese.com. We
hope to see you let us know what you think and of course 加油 (jiā yóu)! See you
next time!