The Prince and the Pauper: Mandarin Companion Graded Readers: Level 1, Simplified Chinese Edition

by Mark Twain, Shishuang Chen (Editor), Gen Ye (Editor)

During a chance encounter, two nearly identical boys, one a poor beggar and the other a prince, decide to exchange places. The pauper, now living in the royal palace, is constantly filled with the dread of being discovered for who and what he really is while the Prince, dressed in rags, lives on the street enduring hardships he never thought possible. Both children soon discover that neither life is as carefree as they expected.

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 storyline that helps beginners grow their vocabulary and language comprehension abilities.

Genres: China, Fiction

104 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 4, 2018

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.

Reviews

[Nel]

level 1 - 300w graded reader.
good but at some point becomes very repetitive. the new words they introduce are repeated ad nauseum so won't be forgetting them any time soon.
longish chapters cook my brain thou so i decided to change my approach - now im gonna be reading in 15 min short sessions throughout the day just to keep good progress.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kind of had expectations for this book and I think that soured my experience.Not bad per se, but some of the "new words" they introduced were way too common. For example, one new word was "老师." Anyone who can read about 300 words of Chinese definitely already know 老师.

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the fourth L1 MC reader I've read, and by now the vocabulary is mostly fairly familiar but of the four it probably has the most difficult grammar/sentence structures. As such I found it slower to read, but I enjoyed the story. I really enjoyed the setting and illustrations; until I learn a lot more Chinese this is probably the closest I'll get to a historical palace drama.

[Fips · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great little story for such limited vocabulary, nicely retold. Definitely recommendable, especially in conjunction with a site like the Chinese Grammar Wiki for joining up the dots.

[Rob Hocking · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the story quite boring, and Level 1 books are no longer challenging enough to make up for a boring story. Picked up some new words though.

[Gabrielle (Estel.Edits) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I restarted this one because I didn't give the palace-specific new vocab enought study the first time through. I felt a lot better about it during the second round!

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars for doing what it sets out to well - keeping the vocabulary at a level for beginning readers and then stretching a bit while also telling a story engaging enough to hold your interest. Love all this series for this. So much more engaging than other graded readers I've seen.

[Karilyn Suvankham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great story! Fun way to learn Chinese!

How they managed to tell this great story in language simple enough for this level, I don't know, but it has been done well, and this is a fun read! It's my favorite of all the level one readers.

[Bex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful grammar and vocab revision, whilst enjoying a retelling of a classic tale.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Popsugar reading challenge 2024: A book originally published under a pen name (read in 2025)

[Bill Squires · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is by far the longest of the level 1 books. I think the reason for this is that the authors tried to preserve too many of the scenes and events from the original story into this shorter version. I think that a more abridged version would have been better but it was still enjoyable to read.

[Oskar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review regards the Taiwanese Mandarin edition of the Mandarin Companion adaptation of the book and not the original text itself.

Wow, what a great resource for practising reading Taiwanese Mandarin! I can't recommend it enough!

This is the first book in the Mandarin Companion series that I have read. I have not read the original book but this adaptation is very engaging and exciting and you want to find out what's gonna happen next. The story itself is really interesting. It is such a pleasure and rewarding experience to read a decent length book like this in Taiwanese Mandarin as a foreign language! The book is 85 pages long and contains the 300 Level 1 core characters plus 99 additional characters. There were only two I didn't know before, one of which I could guess both the meaning and pronunciation.

There's one typo in the book: the character 僕 has been listed correctly in the additional characters' word list but is still used in simplified form, 仆, in the text.

[Karen Guerrero]

1. Awards: None
2. Age Appropriateness: 6th-8th grade
3. Summary: Two nearly identical boys find each other and decide to switch places. One is a poor beggar while the other is a prince. After trading places, they both find out that life is not what they thought it would be, especially not carefree!
4. Review: This is a good book to show children the difference between lifestyles.
5. Uses in a classroom: This book can be used to teach the children about the metaphor, "Walk a mile in another person's shoes". This book can also be used in a lesson about "community" or "social status".

[Chris Dziewa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a decent read as far as graded readers go for this level. There is definitely repetition but that is to be expected when dealing with only 300 characters. The story is worth reading if you are learning Mandarin, although I enjoyed other stories from Mandarin companion more, such as the curse of the monkey's paw, the country of the blind, and the case of the curly headed company.

[Nicholas Driscoll · Rating 3 out of 5]

很有意思了！这个数用容易的词，所以对我很有用。这个故事也很有名所以明白了。不过有时候一个章很长，有时候有点儿短。如果每个帐一样我想那样更好。

Because the story is familiar and the book uses easy Chinese, it's quite useful for learners, but I felt that the chapter lengths were quite unequal, with some being quite long and others fairly short, which gave me a bit of a frustration sometimes.

[Genady · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a very nicely written story that is both fun to read and useful as a graded reader. Fits as a glove to the extensive reading approach advocated by Mandarin Companion.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The plot was a bit too dramatic and not really realistic.

[Aria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giving it 4 stars not exactly because of the story, which in itself is based off of a Mark Twain story, but rather because it is such great material for learning Chinese.

[Ruthanne Bowers · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Chinese was a bit hard but I got it. Now I want to read the original story.