Branching Chinese Stories
You choose what happens next — and the choice is written in Chinese, so choosing is the reading. Three stories, 15 endings between them, with pinyin above every word, a tap-a-word dictionary and audio on every line.
Why a story that branches is worth reading twice
An ordinary graded reader is read once. This one cannot be: each story has 5 endings and a reading only shows you the branch you chose, so the second time through you meet sentences you have never seen. That is the cheapest reading practice there is — the same story, new text, and you already know enough of the setting to guess at the words you do not have.
The decisions are ordinary ones with ordinary consequences: whether to ask a member of staff or handle it yourself, whether to haggle, whether to get in a stranger's car at midnight because you missed the last train. Every ending finishes with a short note about what that branch was actually about — the cost of the choice, or the thing a Chinese speaker would have known to do — because a choice only teaches you something once you are told what it cost.
Beginner to expert, and the difficulty is yours to set
The three stories run from HSK 1–2 up to HSK 5, and the tier on each card is a vocabulary ceiling rather than a label — The Missing Phone is written for HSK 2, Fifty Kuai at the Night Market is written for HSK 4, The 5:30pm Train is written for HSK 5. Inside each story two switches decide how much help you get: with the English translation on you are reading with a safety net, and Challenge mode turns off the pinyin as well, which is the version worth working towards. Everything here is free and needs no account, the same as every other page on this site.
If you would rather read something that goes in a straight line, the graded readers cover HSK 1 to HSK 4 with a comprehension quiz at the end of each; the sentence bank holds every Chinese example sentence the site publishes; and Cloze in Context takes those same sentences and removes a word for you to put back.