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A young boy finds himself alone in a ship in a terrible storm. All the other passengers and crew are dead. Suddenly he sees a bright yellow ball of fire on the mast...
This is a short story in Simplified Chinese, pinyin and English, excerpted from the short story collection "Learn to Read Chinese, Book 1" by Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang. It's based on stories told by Norman Hinsdale Pitman in "A Chinese Wonder Book" originally published in 1918.
Folk tales are immensely popular in China. Passed down orally over the centuries from grandparents and parents to children, they serve as an unwritten handbook for living in society. Nearly all Chinese folk tales are about simple people who find themselves in difficult situations. These people are often helped (and occasionally hindered) by talking animals, as well as by powerful gods, wizards and other supernatural beings who actively participate in events here on earth. Within every Chinese folk tale is an underlying moral message derived from one of the three major schools of spiritual thought – Daoism (also called Taoism), Confucianism, and Buddhism.
Pitman's versions of these stories are wonderfully written, but they were written over a century ago. He wrote them in English for English-speaking readers, and this unrestricted vocabulary is not quite what we're looking for in a graded reader such as this. So we have taken the liberty of retelling this story to use just 358 different Chinese words, most of which are in the standard 1200-word HSK4 vocabulary .
LanguageEnglish
PublisherImagin8 Press
Release dateNov 19, 2021
ISBN9781952601750
Author
Jeff Pepper
Jeff Pepper has worked for thirty years in the computer software business, where he has started and led several successful tech companies, authored two software related books, and was awarded three U.S. software patents. In 2017 he started Imagin8 Press to serve English-speaking students of Chinese.
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Book preview
The Ball of Fire - Jeff Pepper
Enjoy Your Story!
The story in this ebook is taken from our best-selling short story collection, Learn to Read Chinese, Book 1. We’re offering this story with no copy protection. Feel free to share it with your friends, family and fellow students. You can download it in .PDF, .MOBI and .EPUB formats directly from our website www.imagin8press.com by selecting Get Free Book
from the main menu.
If you like this story, consider purchasing the full short story collection, Learn to Read Chinese, Book 1 and our other wonderful graded readers. You can find a list of all of our books on our website. You can also find our books on nearly all major online booksellers including
We offer discounts on larger orders. Go to our website and select Buy Our Books
to learn more.
Acknowledgements
We are deeply indebted to the late Norman Hinsdale Pitman, who originally collected this and many other stories and published them in A Chinese Wonder Book (1919, E.P. Dutton & Co., New York).
Many thanks to the team at Next Mars Media for their terrific illustrations.
Audiobook
A complete Chinese language audio version of this book is available free of charge. To access it, go to YouTube.com and search for the Imagin8 Press channel. There you will find free audiobooks for this and all the other books in this series.
For this story, search YouTube for the Imagin8 Press channel to see all of our free audiobooks. Then select the Learn to Read Chinese, Book 1 audiobook and start listening at the 23:25 mark.
You can also visit our website, www.imagin8press.com, to find a direct link to the YouTube audiobook, as well as information about our other books.
Preface
Believe it or not, it’s possible for you to read and understand this story even if you begin not knowing a single word of Chinese! We won’t lie to you and say it will be easy, but with time and patience you can do it.
Here’s how. You’ll notice that the story is shown in two versions: first a paragraph of Chinese characters, followed by a paragraph of phonetic spelling called pinyin. These two versions are word-for-word identical.
Chinese text looks dense because there are no spaces between the characters, and no capital letters. Also, some
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