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 free 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).

Open the Chinese–English library, where you can search the stories and filter them by level.

Want to hear it too? Chinese stories with audio are narrated, free, with a speed control.

By level:

• Beginner (A1–A2): Easy Chinese short stories for beginners, with English translation · 170 stories
• Intermediate (B1–B2): Intermediate Chinese short stories, side by side with English · 192 stories
• Advanced (C1–C2): Advanced Chinese stories, with the English alongside · 33 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 Chinese graded readers, most of them free: 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.

395 English stories in the library have Chinese alongside: 读英语短篇故事学英语.

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.