The Prince and the Pauper: Mandarin Companion Graded Readers Level 1

Written by Mark Twain

Narrated by Xiuye Zhang

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 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 which helps learners to expand their vocabularies and language comprehension abilities. The more they read, the better they will become at reading and grasping the Chinese language.

• Language: 中文
• Publisher: Mind Spark Press LLC
• Release date: Apr 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781669625087

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835, the son of a lawyer. Early in his childhood, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri – a town which would provide the inspiration for St Petersburg in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. After a period spent as a travelling printer, Clemens became a river pilot on the Mississippi: a time he would look back upon as his happiest. When he turned to writing in his thirties, he adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain ('Mark Twain' is the cry of a Mississippi boatman taking depth measurements, and means 'two fathoms'), and a number of highly successful publications followed, including The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee (1889). His later life, however, was marked by personal tragedy and sadness, as well as financial difficulty. In 1894, several businesses in which he had invested failed, and he was declared bankrupt. Over the next fifteen years – during which he managed to regain some measure of financial independence – he saw the deaths of two of his beloved daughters, and his wife. Increasingly bitter and depressed, Twain died in 1910, aged seventy-five.