My Teacher Is a Martian

Mandarin Companion Graded Readers Breakthrough Level

By: Jared Turner, John Pasden

Narrated by: Xiao Qing

Length: 39 mins

Publisher's summary

Two students are fascinated by outer space, but when their new teacher seems to know more about Mars than anyone could possibly know, they start to suspect that something is unusual. As they encounter inexplicable events, they become convinced their teacher is actually from Mars.

How can they prove it? And who will believe them? They may be the only ones who can discover the truth! 

Mandarin Companion is a series of easy-to-listen-to novels in Chinese that are fun to listen to and proven to accelerate language learning. Every book in the Mandarin Companion series is carefully written to use characters, words, and grammar that a learner is likely to know.

The Breakthrough Level is written using only 150 unique Chinese characters and is intended for Chinese learners who have obtained a low elementary or novice level of Chinese. Most learners will be able to approach this book after one year of traditional formal study, depending on the learner and program.

This level is designed to help learners begin to comprehend full length texts in Chinese and combines simplicity of characters with an easy-to-understand storyline that helps beginners grow their vocabulary and language comprehension abilities.

©2019 Mandarin Companion (P)2020 Mandarin Companion

Great book, poor audiobook

The content is great, and it's amazing that they can write such a compelling story with such a limited vocabulary.

However, the narrator has a staccato reading style and her voice never varies with the 6 speaking characters or with events in the book. If you are reading along while listening then this doesn't matter too much, but this makes only listening difficult to follow.

Unfortunately, the audio quality is also very poor with an uncomfortable sibilance. There is really no good reason for this as it is something that can be cleaned up quite a bit after recording.

All in all, I recommend reading the book, but skipping this audiobook.

Very enjoyable story with which to improve listening comprehension

I decided not to read the text of the story but rather see if I could simply listen and comprehend what was being said. I used the Kindle copy of the book only if I got stuck on understanding a certain word or phrase. I found this a very enjoyable way to use my time in the car for something constructive.

Good listening practice

Great way to learn Chinese. I am reading the level 1 books, and this was a good level for me to practice listening at a high level of comprehension.

Why does the narrator sound like a machine?

I just finished reading my physical copy of this book, which I really enjoyed for the care put into the story and the illustrations. It’s my first graded reader ☺️.

I was hoping to follow it up by passively listening to the audiobook so that I can pick up the right tones and get familiar with the rhythm of how a Chinese narrator would read aloud.

However, I’m really disappointed that it’s not listenable at length. The voice sounds like it’s done by Google Translate, with no “character” to it, no expression to the dialogue of the children or anything.