The Journey to the West, Books 1, 2 and 3: Three Classic Stories in Simplified Chinese and Pinyin, 600 Word Vocabulary Level (Journey to the West in Simplified Chinese)

Loving this book. It makes me feel so confident to be able to read a proper fiction book in Chinese.

Book opened on Christmas day, son asked why I had got a book written in Chinese. We did laugh

Love the story, and the layout of the book (pinyin is on the opposite page, English is hidden away at the back of the book so you aren't tempted to cheat!)Edit: when I started this series I was just begining HSK3. I'm now up to book 9 and have moved on to HSK4. This series has been my constant companion, and has definitely been a major factor in my improved Chinese.Also, I've been listening to free audio version before I go to sleep for extra reinforcement :)

I loved the general outlook and smart simple translation, that made the story very engaging and easy to read. This enabled me to go past my initial fear of reading a whole chinese book so -if only for that- THANKS!

I've been reading this story as part of my journey to literacy, and I figured a series that slowly tunes up the amount of characters would be the perfect way to do that - instead of reading a ton of really hard text or reading these textbooks where I'm supposed to learn a lot of characters and words through a listing on the next page or something, and I was quite correct.So in that sense it lives up to my expectations.What didn't live up to my expectation is just what story I had gotten myself into. You see, I didn't actually know this story at all or what it was really all about, and I never expected such an old novel to be laced with humor, but it is. We've got stupid allegories, funny jokes, rash characters, exaggerations, and even puns! Puns that, of course, only work in Chinese.Sometimes it actually leaves me in stitches. This isn't normal for old works in the western hemisphere which tend to be purely spiritual, but this is both spiritual and funny.If you're around HSK3 level right now, do yourself a favor. Grab this, get some Chinese culture, get some reading exercise, and get some laughs.Absolutely recommended.

I thought this would be the perfect book to aid learning Chinese without first having to learn the at least 2,000 characters I've heard are necessary to read real Chinese content. It could have been exactly that but there are some frustrating shortcomings that, as far as I can tell, could easily have been avoided. Strangely, I've noticed that all the books I've bought that use pinyin (vocabulary / grammar books etc.) have fairly regular mistakes with tones and this book is no exception. I read through a large part of the book with the help of a Chinese speaker and was told far too often that, "That's a mistake." I can now make sense of most of it without any help but am constantly running into typos that make an already challenging project even more difficult. Today's mistakes include, amongst others, 好 (hǎo) written with a fourth tone, 因为 (yīn wèi) written with a second tone instead of the fourth and the common mistake of writing 不 (bù) with the fourth tone in cases where it should change to the second tone. It seems the proofreading was not very thorough meaning that your Chinese needs to be good enough to correct these mistakes when they occur. There are also a few instances of the incorrect pinyin being used to translate 长 (cháng or zhǎng) which, again, means you need a higher level to get through these sentences than would otherwise be necessary if you want to tackle the book on your own. The third issue I have with this book is the one that's frustrating / infuriating me the most at the moment. The authors made the bizarre decision to write the English translation at the back of the book in such a way that it's a very poor reflection of the Chinese. Vocabulary is often different and single sentences in the Chinese version are often translated with multiple sentences in the English version and vice versa when it would have been very easy to write a more direct translation. I would go as far to say that 50% or more of the sentences in the book are just approximate translations. As an example, so you can decide for yourselves if this will be an issue for you, there is the following sentence:"Xièxiè nǐmen lái qǐng wǒ cānjiā zhège yànhuì."The translation is given as "Thank you for inviting me to the feast." However, lái = come and cānjiā = participate / attend. Why these words were not included in the translation is beyond me considering this is a resource presumably intended for self-study. Surely, "Thank you for coming to invite me to attend the feast," would have been a more useful translation. My English is already good enough to get by so I would personally much prefer a more direct translation even if it sounds a little clumsy and prosaic.As my Chinese improves I imagine these issues will cease to be a problem and I'll find the books as good as other customers clearly have. For the moment all I can say is that, disappointingly, what could have been a great resource is just ok.