Book Review: Great Expectations: Part 1 (Mandarin Companion)

I recently read another Mandarin Companion book called Great Expectations Part 1 adapted by John Pasden from the Charles Dickens original book.

I love these books.

John Pasden is well-known to anyone who’s been learning Mandarin for any length of time. He was one of the presenters at ChinesePod over the years. He set up a company called Mandarin Companion that produces graded readers.

If you haven’t seen graded readers (in any language), they are reading books that limit the scope of the target language to a particular set of words (or in this case characters).

The aim when reading content in a target language is to have around 90 percent of the words that you are reading, already known to you. If you read content and you have to look up more than say 10 percent of the words, you’ll get bored quickly.

The beauty of these books in eBook format (and in particular in Kindle format), is that if you see an unfamiliar word, it’s likely that it’s underlined and you can just click it, to go directly to an explanation. Then just return to your reading. That’s truly wonderful.

Interesting stories

One of the challenges when working with language that you can consume, is to keep the stories interesting. What John and his team have done, is to take classic books, and reposition them as stories within China. So the basic concept of the story is the same, but it’s been relocated to another place. And the characters in the books, that you’ve previously known, have been replaced by appropriate Chinese people.

It’s a wonderful concept. I notice that there are also now audiobooks for this series. That’s what I’ll tackle next. My reading is pretty good, but my listening is still too slow, so the more consumable content that I get, the better.

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Summary

Loved this book in so many ways.

10 out of 10

2025-06-27