Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Curly Haired Company: Mandarin Companion Graded Readers: Level 1, Simplified Chinese Edition

By: Arthur Conan Doyle

Narrated by: Zhang Xiuye

Length: 59 mins

Publisher's summary

Mr. Xie was recently hired by the Curly Haired Company. For a significant weekly allowance, he was required to sit in an office and copy articles from a book, while in the meantime his assistant looked after his shop. He had answered an advertisement in the paper and although hundreds of people applied, he was the only one selected because of his very curly hair. When the company unexpectedly closes, Mr. Xie visits Gao Ming (Sherlock Holmes) with his strange story. Gao Ming is certain something is not right, but will he solve the mystery in time?

Mandarin Companion is a series of easy-to-read novels in Chinese that are fun to read 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.

Level 1 is written using approximately 300 unique Chinese characters and intended for Chinese learners at an upper-elementary level. Most learners will be able to approach this book after one to two years of formal study, depending on the learner and program. This series is designed to combine simplicity of characters with an easy-to-understand story line that helps beginners grow their vocabulary and language comprehension abilities.

Please note: This audiobook is in Mandarin Chinese.

©2013 Mind Spark Press (P)2013 Mind Spark Press

Great Tool for Chinese listening skills

Really helpful to have audio versions of the Mandarin Companion book series. Sherlock Holmes is entertaining and a good sustained but digestible story.

Great listening for HSK2

I recommend this to any Chinese learner at a beginner/intermediate level working on listening skills. The performance also has some fun with sound effects toward the end that are worth catching.

Happy learning mandarin

I am learning with this amazing tool, the voice is clear and the pronunciation very understandable

Such a Valuable Learning Tool!

This Mandarin Companion series is the most wonderful way to learn Chinese! I have bought six of these books so far and plan to buy many more. I first bought the simplified books on Kindle, and later bought some of the same ones but with the traditional characters in the print version so I can read at night without the blue light keeping me awake. I also bought the Audible version so that I can improve my listening by listening faster and faster, and so I can repeat after the speaker at pace, and also so that I can listen and follow along in the book in hopes of absorbing new characters like a child does when following along while a parent reads to them. There are so many ways to use these books, and the stories are engaging. Highly recommend!

Overall very good; but chapter numbering confusion

I liked this a lot, but wanted to point out that there is a chapter numbering discrepancy. What is displayed as Chapter 1 is just a short intro about the book and series. When that is completed then Chapter 2 is displayed and a narrator announces "Chapter 1", and this mismatch continues through to end of the book. Not a major issue once you understand, but if you are trying to match the audio to the Kindle e-book you might be confused.

Great for Chinese learners!

Had fun with this book! It really helped my ability to understand spoken Chinese!

I listened while reading the e-book to get more out of it. Great read

Easy to follow.

I have both read and listened to this story. Both are done very well and are easy to follow. My reading ability is much higher than my listening ability, but because of the pacing in this book I don't have a lot of trouble listening to it. The story is interesting and it's a good length for my non-Chinese brain to digest. As with all the other Mandarin Companion books, I still don't understand why the Chapters are read in English. It is very distracting and makes me lose focus on Chinese. I find it hard to keep my mind from wandering when I listen to a foreign language. Throwing in a loud English voice every 10 minutes makes it worse. That is the only point I knocked off on my review. The rest is great!