Have you ever wanted to practice reading Chinese on your iPad, but couldn’t find anything at the right level? nciku might be able to help! We’ve made an iPad version of our bilingual Chinese translation of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, with built-in sound for both the Chinese and English versions.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter, has been enjoyed by readers across the world for more than a hundred years, and is one of the best selling books of all time. As it’s aimed at children the language is fairly simple, but if there’s anything you don’t understand, the language features built into our reader might be able to help you:
* Switch between the Chinese and English versions of each page by clicking the 中/英 button
* Tap a paragraph of Chinese text to see its pinyin
* Tap the speaker icon to listen to the current page, in English or Chinese
The pinyin was created using the pinyin generator we use for nciku’s Sentence Mode, while the Chinese audio uses the same text-to-speech system as our conversations and example sentences [update: the new version of the app has a real speech recording for the Chinese text, recorded by nciku staff]. The English audio is actually a real public-domain recording from LibriVox, created by Kara Shallenberg.
Click here to download this app for free
We hope you find this free bilingual ebook interesting and educational, and if you have any comments, questions or suggestions we’d love to hear them - please post a comment below. Even if you don’t have an iPad you can still enjoy reading our online translation of this book.
(unfortunately this application is not available in all territories - if your iTunes account is set to the USA, China and most other countries, but in Singapore or the European Union The Tale of Peter Rabbit is still copyrighted, despite being written well over 100 years ago).
4 responses so far ↓
1 Ying Cheng
Aug 20, 2010 at 8:02 pm
Hi,
It looks like perfect book for a 6 year old!
Too bad, this is only available from US iTune store. I want to buy for my daughter but we can’t buy it from Swedish store. What a pity. Is there other ways to get this app and its bilingual books?
2 Ying Cheng
Aug 20, 2010 at 8:02 pm
Hi,
It looks like perfect for a 6 year old!
Too bad, this is only available from US iTune store. I want to buy for my daughter but we can’t buy it from Swedish store. What a pity. Is there other ways to get this app and its bilingual books?
3 Kevin
Aug 23, 2010 at 11:31 am
@Ying Cheng: Unfortunately this app isn’t available in the EU because Beatrix Potter’s books are still in copyright there - it only expires in December 2013.
BUT, you can still access our web-based version at http://www.nciku.com/books/peter_rabbit (if you want to listen to the sound, you’ll need to use a normal computer instead of an iPad because it uses Flash).
4 Tim Traynor
Jul 3, 2012 at 8:57 am
Can’t get the sound on my iPad even though I am using the iPad app version. Is there a trick?
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