Features by Series Table

Features by Series

Series	# of Books	Formats	Audio	Glossary	Features and Formatting
Chinese Breeze	21 books, 4 levels (300, 500, 750, 1100 words)	Paperback, Kindle	CDs (older editions), mp3s (newer editions)	Difficult words only	The stories are fun, and they don’t introduce too many new words or names at once. They also tend to pick names composed of characters that are likely to be familiar to the reader. Does not have pinyin or English annotation.
Edmund Chua's Graded Chinese Readers	9 books, 6 levels (HSK 1-6)	Paperback, Kindle	No	Difficult words only	These books first present the story sentence-by-sentence, with pinyin and English below each Chinese sentence, then presents it paragraph-by-paragraph. It’s a good way of making it easy to find the meaning or pronunciation of words you don’t know, while the paragraph-by-paragraph presentation allows the more advanced reader not to be bothered with pinyin above every word. And this approach works well with the Kindle version too.
HSK Academy	4 books, 4 levels (HSK 1, 2, 4, 6)	Paperback, Kindle	No	No	Similar to Edmund Chua’s books, this series solves the problem of unfamiliar vocabulary by including a paragraph-by-paragraph version with accompanying pinyin and English, as well as a full-story version in characters.
HSK Storybooks	9 books, 3 levels (HSK 1-3)	Paperback, Kindle	mp3s	Difficult words only	Includes full story with characters as well as a paragraph-by-paragraph version with accompanying pinyin and English. These books provide very targeted practice for the HSK exam, covering all of the words for the specified level without requiring many additional words.
Imagin8	12 books, 2 levels (600, 1200 words)	Paperback, Kindle	YouTube	All words	Paperback version has pinyin on the opposite page from the characters, which works well for seeing how to pronounce a character without being distracted by the pinyin. The Kindle version presents the whole story first in characters, then in pinyin, then in English.
Mandarin Companion	14 books, 3 levels (150, 300, 450 characters)	Paperback, Kindle	Audio book available separately	Difficult words only	IMO, the best, most interesting stories of all the series. These books are some of the very few to be available in both simplified and traditional characters. Does not include pinyin or English transcription.
Rainbow Bridge	~40 books, 7 levels (150, 300, 500, 750, 1000, 1500, 2500 words)	Paperback, Kindle, Pleco	mp3s	Difficult words only	The stories are fun, but these books tend to introduce a lot of difficult words and names right at the beginning, which makes them frustrating to read sometimes. Also, the Kindle versions consist of images of the print pages, so there’s no added functionality.
SK Mishra’s Chinese Short Stories	12 books, all “Level 1”	Paperback, Kindle	No	No	Despite being billed as “Level 1”, these are pretty advanced (i.e. above HSK 5 level). The books first present the story in characters, then in pinyin.
Sinolingua Graded Chinese Readers	6 books, 6 levels (500-3000 words)	Paperback, Kindle, Pleco	mp3s on CD	Not all words, but pretty extensive	The stories are really interesting, as they are abridged versions of works by contemporary Chinese authors. These books have pinyin above the Chinese characters, which can be distracting. The paper versions come with a card to be used for covering the pinyin, which is a nice option, even if slightly unwieldy. The Kindle versions are images of the print pages, so there’s no way to cover the pinyin. With the Pleco versions, there’s no such issue (characters only, tap to look them up).