Journey to the West

Author: Wu Cheng'en (Ming) and Yan Baohua
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2004-01-01
Features: This book's main feature is to simplify complexity and highlight the story. The four great classical novels are often hundreds of chapters long, nearly a million words, with hundreds of characters, making it confusing for adults to follow, let alone children. This series of books structures the story around the main characters, selecting the most thrilling and spectacular parts. The editors' approach is clear: for lower-grade children, it is important to focus on the main points and highlight the story, while appreciating the subtleties of the original works can wait until the child grows up. This bold adaptation is also suitable for the reading level of lower-grade children, and only those who deeply understand children's reading psychology would handle the original works in this way.
Secondly, pinyin is annotated, and appropriate notes are provided. The purpose of pinyin is to enable children to read independently and gradually transition to literary reading. Annotating seems simple but is actually challenging. If the notes are too detailed, they may hinder children's reading and make it difficult for them to "assimilate" difficulties encountered during reading. If the notes are too brief, they may add to the burden of reading for children. This series of books adopts a method where notes are provided only when necessary, avoiding excessive annotations, and only annotating some ancient proper nouns, such as official titles and place names, to give children enough reading freedom.
Finally, the language of this book. The goal of language teaching in Chinese classes is to expose students to various forms of language.