Read your first book in Chinese.
Short stories built from the Chinese you already know. A night market in Taipei, a courtyard in Beijing, a train across Yunnan, in characters you can actually read.
Characters you know, in sentences you can follow.
Chinese is where the gap between knowing words and reading is widest. You can recognise a character on its own and still lose it in a sentence, because the meaning lives in the pairs it forms and the rhythm of the line, and no flashcard shows you those.
The only thing that does is reading, a lot of it, at a level where you can follow most of the page. Graded readers for Chinese exist and some are good, but they run out fast and they don't know which characters you already have. Children's books use ones no course teaches in the first year. Native fiction is a wall.
ReadBilingual gives you short Chinese stories that stay inside the characters and words you know, with a few new ones a chapter. Tap any word for its meaning and pinyin. Press play to hear it read aloud, and let your ear catch up with your eyes.
A reading level for every Chinese learner
Just startingHSK 1–2
About 250 core words. The most common characters, in short sentences. One or two people, one place.
ComfortableHSK 3
About 800 core words. Multi-chapter stories with a small cast. Time words, measure words, simple past and future.
ConversationalHSK 4
About 2,000 core words. Dialogue, subplots, more two-character compounds. Full short stories.
IndependentHSK 5
About 4,000 core words. Idiom, chengyu, regional voice. Novellas of 8 to 12 chapters.
AdvancedHSK 6
Modern Chinese fiction, at native level.
The classics
At C1 the rest of Chinese literature opens up. From Lu Xun to Yu Hua, we'll show you where to start.
“I knew most of the characters in the children's book. I still couldn't read the page. That's the gap ReadBilingual exists to close, and Chinese is the language I built it for first.”Julia Tokola, founder
今天开始阅读吧。
Coming soon to iOS and Android. Your first story will be five minutes away.
