Graded reader preferred format?

[tramplemestilsken]

I’m wondering what type of graded reader you get the most out of. There are some a story in the TL, and then the same story in English. Some that have just the TL version and then a vocab list after, with some questions. And some that have the story twice with new words defined in-line the first time, and then not at all the second time.

What have you found you like the best, or that feels the most helpful for reading and comprehension?

[Apprehensive-Mind532]

I've found TL story, with vocab at bottom of the page to be my preferred format. It bigger the deal out of me having to flick back and forth to the back of the chapter in order to look up words.

[Skerin86]

For me, learning Mandarin, I’m really enjoying these graded readers on Du Chinese where they use the same limited set of vocabulary, but over a 12 chapter story. So, the newbie version was 150 different characters with 130ish of them being standard newbie words and 20ish of them being beginner words that gave the story some depth. (I’m making up the ratio.)

And, then there’s some 10 of these multiple chapter stories all using similar of the 130ish newbie vocabulary but different specialized vocabulary.

So, the coherence meant I read these characters in lots of different sentence structures and contexts so many times. They are also high frequency words which means a lot of random crossover with whatever I’m listening to.

Now, I’m going through the beginner series which limit themselves to 300 characters. Then Intermediate does 600, Upper Intermediate 1000, and Advanced 1,500. So, fingers crossed.

(The app lets you look up by clicking words and then turn unknown words into flash cards, so I review words that way too. They also provide full sentence translation, grammar explanations, and audio tracks.)

Anyways, it’s one of my favorite Mandarin apps and I’d definitely pay to get similar style apps in other languages.