Graded Readers — Books You Can Actually Finish

Q: Do I have to buy anything for graded readers?

No. This site covers the same ground for free — 41 free graded readers with pinyin and tap-to-define, Measure your reading speed, free, 10,000+ example sentences, searchable — and those pages need no account and cost nothing. The items on this page are for the things a website cannot be.

Q: Are these ranked by what they pay you?

No, and they structurally cannot be: the data record behind a recommendation on this site has no field for a commission, a rate or a partner, so the ordering cannot follow the money. Every item is ordered by who the reader is.

Q: Why is there no price shown?

Because we have no licensed way to keep a price current, and a stale price on a page like this is worse than none. Cost is shown as a band instead — budget, mid-range or premium.

Real stories written inside a word limit, so you read fluently instead of decoding.

Free on this site, right now

A graded reader is a real story written under a hard vocabulary ceiling — 300 words, 500 words, 1,000 words — so that you can read a whole page without stopping. That matters more than it sounds. Reading a text where you look up one word in eight is decoding, not reading, and it builds neither speed nor the sense of what a natural sentence feels like. Reading a text where you look up one word in fifty does both, and it is the single most efficient thing an intermediate learner can do.

There are 41 graded readers on this site already, free, with pinyin you can switch off and tap-to-define on every word. Read those first — they cost nothing and they will tell you which level you actually read at, which is usually one rung lower than people expect. The books below are for when you have run out and want something novel-length.

Every item below says what it does not do. Nothing is ordered by what it pays — see how this page is written.

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Showing every level in this category.

Elementary Budget

Mandarin Companion, Level 1

John Pasden and Jared Turner

The best-executed graded readers in Chinese, and the reason is an editorial decision most of the competition did not make: they adapt Western novels — Sherlock Holmes, The Secret Garden — and reset them in China, so you already know the shape of the plot and can spend all your attention on the language. Level 1 works inside 300 characters, which is roughly HSK 2, and each book is a genuine short novel rather than a set of passages.

What it does not do: 300 characters is a real constraint and the prose is plain because of it — this is not literature and does not pretend to be. Each book is short enough that a regular reader will get through one in a couple of sittings, which makes the per-hour cost high.

Free here first: 41 graded readers here, free

Look it up on amazon.ca

Intermediate Budget

Mandarin Companion, Level 2

John Pasden and Jared Turner

Same series, 450 characters, and the step up is noticeable in a good way: the sentences get longer and start using the connectives that make Chinese prose flow rather than list. If Level 1 felt easy, skip straight here. This is the level at which most HSK 3–4 learners discover they can read a book in Chinese, which is a different feeling from passing a reading comprehension section and tends to be what keeps people studying.

What it does not do: There are far fewer Level 2 titles than Level 1, so the series runs out quickly. It also sits in an awkward gap — too easy once you are comfortable at HSK 4, and nothing in the series bridges to unsimplified material.

Free here first: Test which level you read at, free

Look it up on amazon.ca

Elementary Budget

Chinese Breeze graded reader series

Liu Yuehua and Chu Chengzhi · Peking University Press

The other established series, and it differs from Mandarin Companion in a way worth knowing: the stories are original and set in contemporary China, so the vocabulary you pick up is the vocabulary of ordinary modern life rather than of a transplanted Victorian plot. Levels run from 300 to 1,100 words. Most titles include audio, which makes them usable as listening practice once you have read them.

What it does not do: The writing quality is uneven across the series — some titles are genuinely good and others read like a textbook exercise stretched to novella length. Because the plots are original you get no head start from knowing the story.

Free here first: Read a free one first

Look it up on amazon.ca

Beginner Budget

Chinese Short Stories for Beginners

Lingo Mastery

Twenty short stories with pinyin, an English summary and a vocabulary list after each, aimed lower than anything else on this page — usable from roughly HSK 1–2. The format is the selling point: each story is short enough to finish in one sitting while your Chinese is still bad enough that finishing anything feels unlikely, and that early win is what gets a beginner to the point where the proper graded readers become accessible.

What it does not do: The pinyin runs alongside throughout, which is comfortable and also the reason many readers never stop leaning on it. The stories are functional rather than memorable, and a few contain phrasing a native speaker would not choose.

Free here first: Free stories with switchable pinyin

Look it up on amazon.ca

Advanced Mid-range

Graded Chinese Reader series

Sinolingua

This is the series that bridges from graded material to real writing, and almost nothing else does. The stories are abridged works by actual contemporary Chinese authors, kept inside a vocabulary ceiling but retaining the author's structure and voice — so you are reading a compromised version of real literature rather than a polished version of a textbook. At the 1,500 and 2,500-word levels the compromise becomes very light indeed.

What it does not do: It is a hard step up and the lower volumes still assume solid HSK 4. The annotations are sparse and the English support is minimal, so you will want a dictionary open. Print quality varies between printings.

Free here first: Search 10,000+ real sentences, free

Look it up on amazon.ca