We just got this set of eight books and are having a lot of fun with them. Very colorful illustrated versions of Little Red Riding Hood (missing in the product detail images on this page), The Frog Prince, The Sad Prince, Snow White, Pinocchio, The Emperor's New Clothes, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty.
You set the eReadbook pen to each book by touching to the logo on the book's cover, then set the volume with the visible volume control printed inside the book. Then you read through the book by touching both the written (simplified chinese and pinyin) text and the images. They work together, with a lot of the dialogue not being in the text, but rather when you touch the characters illustrated on the page. This adds a lot of interest and fun for the child, as each character has a different voice and speaks his lines with great emotion! Many other details on the pages can be touched to add further sound input: most of the animals either speak or make animal sounds, flowers and backgrounds play music, water splashes etc.
There is no English, and much of the body of the storytelling is in touching the illustrations, so it takes a reasonable comprehension of Chinese to make good use of these books. Of course knowing these classic tales in advance helps a lot with understanding the chinese if you are a learner. We are at an elementary level (I have been learning for three years on my own) and can understand most if listened to several times.
It would have been better if when the text was touched with the pen, that it was read sentence by sentence. Instead when you touch the text, it reads the whole page at once, rather quickly. You can touch a "stop" button at the top of each page, but that just stops where it is at when you stop it, and when you restart it begins all over from the start of the page. This can be quite annoying if you just don't catch the last four words: you have to listen to the whole paragraph over and over to catch the last words. You also cannot just click on just one character or pinyin word to hear it (at least that I understand: the instructions are in Chinese). The "beginning English" book included with the eReadbook Starter Set has the feature I wish they had put in these storybooks: it reads only a sentence at a time. So you can click on only the third sentence in a paragraph and hear that repeated. I guess they were made for fluent Chinese speakers learning English and not the other way round.
The illustrations vary from digital picturebook type drawings to quite flowery manga-type illustrations for the princess stories, but they are all very very full of details and brilliant color.
Each spread also has a "game" function. Once again you need to be able to understand spoken basic chinese, but when you touch the game icon at the top of each page, instead of reading the story, it prompts you to find things on the page, ie "there is a little caterpillar, little friend can you find it?" "There are six little birds on the page, can you count them?" and then says "great! good job! wonderful! you're so smart!" when you touch the right objects, or " sorry, try again! that's wrong! once more!" if you touch the wrong ones.
All in all, an excellent elementary/intermediate set for storytelling and listening practice in Chinese, with a lot of interaction, fun discoveries on the pages, colorful illustrations, engaging voices and games. Recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment