They did have an very ambitious aim to create more than 50 books in 8 different levels. I got some of the low levels and they are very good reading material giving excellent practicing without an overflow of new words/characters. However, the higher levels are still not out and their homepages are gone and no info to be found if there ever will come any more books. Anyone know anything about it? For beginners I can recommend the books a very good reading material with a good structure and also comes with audio book files in different speed. This for around 15 块。

The first book of level 3 in the series(750 words), "The Third Eye / 第三只眼睛", has just been published. The lsdy who runs the online shop where I bought the previous ones was kind enough to notify me of the new release, otherwise I might have missed it completely, since I had almost given up hope.

Thanks, that one I have not seen in my local bookstore in Hangzhou. Is there any new URL info in the book about their new site perhaps? Their old sites are all gone since a year or so.

Wow, i bought series 1 and 2 about 2 years ago and loved them. I was very upset when I couldn't find the third series. I wonder why it's taken so long to launnch the third series.

I will definatly be looking out for them in the future!

The only URL they give is that of Peking University Press www.pup.cn.
They do, however, give title and synopsis of the next book in the series "The Painted Skin / 画皮", which looks like a nice ghost story, so the project is definitely going on.

I'm an EFL teacher and I'm always on at my students to try graded readers, so I bought all these books too - you also get a CD of a native speaker reading the story at slow and fast speeds - a really worthwhile addition to your language learning tool set.

The Painted Skin is an interesting and weird ghost story; I read it in translation for one of my classes. I find it difficult to imagine as a beginner/intermediate level text, though.

Does anyone know of a cheap way to get hold of these books in the UK? I've had a look on Amazon but it isn't very helpful :(

I think that Foyles in London sometimes has them - I always drop in when I'm down there. If you are lucky, the small bookshop in Chinatown in London might have them as well, as they have learning materials. I got mine online (as I suspect @bribri did) from http://www.studychineseculture.com/ which is relatively cheap.

Try http://www.cypressbooks.com/ I've ordered from them before and they're reliable.

@thinkbuddha
Your guess is correct - you probably got your email from Mrs Zhu as well. It's nice, for a change, to get a marketing email so much to the point. And of course buying just that one book looked like a waste of shipping expenses, so I got a lot of other texts which are way beyond my level. Oh well, if I keep at it long enough...

@Catherine

In Australia, books are way over-priced, and I used http://www.studychineseculture.com/ as the others have recommended. I got all of the Chinese Breeze books in series 1 and 2 for about $50, including shipping, and they cost about $10 each here! I do recommend them and, as bribri hinted, the customer service is very good and personal :)

You do have to wait a while for them to be delivered, I think it took about a month to get here, but it is worth it.

Thanks Happy Blue for the link - yes Ozzie foreign language books are just ridiculously priced...the Chinese Breeze ones at around $9 each I actually considered reasonable compared to most, especially bilingual story books for kids!!!

I will be in Xian for a few weeks in January - does anyone think I will easily get the CHinese Breeze books there before I order on-line?

I have read 4 of these already, I got from www.bookdepository.com as they have free postage - but they only stock a few.

Cheers,
Donna

Thanks for all the help guys, I'll have a look around on the sites you've mentioned :)

Catherine, you can definitely get all level 1 & 2 books, as well as the Level 3 "The Third Eye" from www.chinesebookshop.com. Joshua, who works there, is really helpful, and has made several other excellent suggestions (I am a beginner, and comfortable at level 1, just moving up to level 2). The back page of "The third eye" says there is another level 3 book "the painted skin", but I don't think the chinesebookshop has it in stock yet (I don't know if it is printed yet).

Good luck

Can anyone recommend some decent series of children's chapter books in Chinese (and provide tips on where to buy them online)? For those familiar with them, I was thinking about the reading level of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew, the Boxcar Children, Wayside School... the step beyond picture books but before what I guess they call "young adult fiction" like Harry Potter. Ideally I'd be looking for things that are set in modern times rather than historical, because the vocabulary for stories set in ancient China seems to have a lot of obscure and otherwise useless characters. Formulaic series would be nice; don't have to learn as many new proper names each time.

Anyone had any experiences with books like this?