Do you have an iPad? Did you like our free bilingual Peter Rabbit iPad ebook? If so, you might be interested in our latest iPad application, which bundles together Peter Rabbit and five more classic animal stories by Beatrix Potter: The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, The Tale of Mrs Tiggywinkle, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck and The Tale of Jeremy Fisher.
Like the Peter Rabbit application, all of the books are completely bilingual, and you can switch between the Chinese and English versions of each page by clicking the 中/英 button or listen to the page in either English or Chinese by clicking on the speaker icon. But we’ve made a few improvements over our previous app as well - the biggest difference is that the Chinese translations now have a “real speech” recording of the page read by Chinese members of the nciku team, instead of using our text-to-speech system (the English version already featured real speech). We’ll also release an updated version of the Peter Rabbit app with these improvements soon. [update: this is now done]
You can download this application for $2.99 US dollars or your local equivalent - less than 50 cents a book! All of these books have been enjoyed by readers across the world for more than a hundred years, and are some of the best selling children’s books of all time. We hope it can help you in your Chinese (or English) studies.
(unfortunately this application is not available in all regions- the books were written over 100 years ago but are still in copyright in some countries, including the European Union, Singapore and some parts of Latin America)
Update: We’ve now also released Japanese versions of the free Peter Rabbit ebook and the $2.99 collection of 6 Beatrix Potter books, so if you enjoy our apps and know someone who’s studying Japanese, please let them know!
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9 responses so far ↓
1 Steven Poling Jr. 石伯霖
Aug 6, 2010 at 9:52 pm
( userID: RoamAure = 无法无天 / 無法無天 )
Can this work on iPhone 4? If not, please make a version for iPhone 4!
2 Steven Poling Jr. 石伯霖
Aug 7, 2010 at 3:56 am
Can this be done for iPhone 4? I very much would like to use it on iPhone 4. Not ever going to get an iPad…
3 me
Aug 7, 2010 at 7:00 am
Ugh, iPad only =/ We need an iPhone version. Atleast are you planning on making this available on the website?
4 me
Aug 7, 2010 at 7:07 am
Just wanted to add that I think this is a great thing being offered and the price isn’t bad considering it has real voice actors instead of a text-to-speech engine for the Chinese dialogue. I just wish I could read them either on my PC or on my iPhone.
Just thought I’d add that if my previous comment sounded a bit negative. I don’t understand why you artificially limit yourselves to a device with only a 3 million unit install base compared to the iPhone’s 100 million units, not to mention the iPods.
5 Kevin
Aug 9, 2010 at 10:38 am
There’s a web version of Peter Rabbit here: http://www.nciku.com/books/peter_rabbit . We haven’t updated it with the ‘real speech’ Chinese yet, but we will do that early this week.
The reason it was initially launched on the iPad is that each double-page of these books has a picture and some text; showing both at the same time makes things harder to read on the smaller iPhone / iPod Touch screen. But there’s an obvious solution to that, and it’s clear that iPhone users want to use this too, so we will start working to create an iPhone/iPod Touch-compatible version.
6 Poster
Aug 17, 2010 at 10:10 am
I really love that more and more companies (and private people) come up with useful elearning tools. It took a long long long time, but it seems the waiting is over. And we see quality learning tools on the market.
I am really curious if schools and universities will adapt their teachings, and start to do interesting language lessons. If not, I hope they will just disappear like the typewriters disappeared (in favor of computers).
hehe
7 John
Aug 29, 2010 at 10:03 pm
Kevin: Any news on the real speech Chinese for the online version of Peter Rabbit? I don’t have an iPad but it would be really useful to be able to read along with the real voices.
8 Kevin
Sep 2, 2010 at 6:21 pm
@John: We’ve uploaded the real speech version now - sorry about the wait (we were busy with other projects and had overlooked the website version)
9 Hao Mama 好妈妈 » Blog Archive » Just in time for summer vacation: iPhone apps to learn Chinese
Jun 2, 2011 at 7:19 am
[…] standard Chinese children’s songs. - One I just discovered today and am excited to try out: Beatrix Potter storybooks, in English and Chinese, with the original illustrations. - I’m also testing out a couple of […]
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