Easy-Read 4 Chinese Audiobooks: Chinese Traditional Cultural Studies

These four Easy-Read Chinese audiobooks are specially made to be compatible with Easy-Read Pen, a pen-shaped book reader onto which audio from specific books can be downloaded.

When Easy-Read Pen scans across book pages, either images or texts, the corresponding Chinese words, phrases, paragraphs, or dialogues are read out loudly in clear mandarin, a new technique of Point and Read. Please see E-reading pen: an interactive tool to learn Chinese for more details.

This package includes four Chinese traditional cultural studies: Chéngyu, the Analects of Confucius (Children’s Edition), the Three Character Classic and Tang Poems. All books have 248 pages.

The 248-page Chéngyu features an excellent selection of popular Chengyu, often referred to as Chinese idioms or four-character idioms. Chengyu, or Chinese idioms, are a type of traditional Chinese idiomatic expressions, most of which consist of four characters. Chengyu were widely used in classical Chinese and are still common in vernacular Chinese writing and spoken Chinese today.

The Analects of Confucius (Children’s Edition) is a simplified version of the Analects of Confucius, a record of the words and acts of the central Chinese thinker and philosopher Confucius and his disciples, as well as the discussions they held. It is the representative work of Confucianism and continues to have a tremendous influence on Chinese and East Asian thought and values today.

The Three Character Classic, or called San Zi Jing, is one of the embodiments of Confucianism suitable for teaching young children. It has served as a child's first formal education at home for thousands of years. With the short and simple text arranged in three-character verses, children learned many common characters, grammar structures, elements of Chinese history and the basis of Confucian morality.

The 248-page Tang Poems features an excellent selection of popular poems from the Tang Dynasty. Tang Dynasty marked the high point of classical Chinese poetry. Not only was the period prolific in poets and in poems (perhaps as many as 50,000 poems), but poetry was integrated into almost every aspect of professional and social life, including as part of the Imperial examinations taken by anyone wanting a government post.

You can upload the audio files of these books into your Easy-Read Pen. These audio files are available from a CD that comes with the books. Or you can download them from here.

Here is a demo video for Chinese Traditional Cultural Studies. Please enable your computer audio and increase the speaker volume so that you can hear the sound track.