MyOwnLingo
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NederlandsDaily story
One story for each level, told a short chapter at a time, by email each morning if you like. Each chapter brings in a few new words and keeps using the ones before, so the story grows with you.
How to read it
- Read at your level: you should know about eight words in ten. Pick the level where that's true.
- Look at the title and the set-up line first. They give you the scene.
- Read the whole chapter through without stopping to look things up. Just follow the story.
- Pause: what happened, and to whom? The questions help.
- Read it again with the help on: the words glossed, the English for each sentence, the notes.
- Keep going: the next chapter comes tomorrow.
Make a free account and the next chapter comes each morning, at your level and your pace.
The stories
黑猫 A1
The Black Cat
Lin Yue has just moved to a small town to study. On her first morning a black cat is waiting at her door with a slip of paper in its mouth, and on the paper is a number. Every morning the cat comes back, and every morning the number is different.
20 chapters · complete
约定的树 A2
The Promise Tree
Xiaofang has a new part-time job in a small second-hand bookshop in the town of Qingshan. In a box of old books she finds a photograph of two children under a big tree by a temple, and on it a promise: at next year's temple fair, meet me under this tree. Wu Nainai, the old woman who runs the shop, says she has never seen them. Xiaofang is sure she is not telling the truth.
20 chapters · complete
对面的店 B1
The Shop Across the Lane
Xiaolan is twenty-four and runs a tiny noodle shop of her own in a Beijing hutong. Her zhajiangmian is what everyone comes for, and the bean paste in it comes by post from Grandpa Tian, an old maker in a mountain village. This month the paste doesn't come, Grandpa Tian doesn't answer the phone, and a big, loud chain noodle shop has just opened across the lane with a queue down the hutong and a young cook who seems to know far too much about Xiaolan's bean paste.
20 chapters · complete
秦家客栈 B2
The Qin Family Inn
Xiaoyu has taken a job at the Qin Family Inn, an old hot-spring inn deep in the mountains, but she is not really there to work: her company wants to buy the inn, and her boss has sent her to find out what it is worth. From her first night things start going wrong, one after another, and always when it matters most. Someone at the inn is not what they seem. Then again, neither is Xiaoyu.
20 chapters · complete
钟停了的小镇 C1
The Town Where the Clock Stopped
For fifty years the clock in the tower of Baihe, a small snowbound town in the mountains of the north-east, has stood at three, and the town lives on the story of why: on the night of the great snow, they say, it stopped by itself. Now the mayor has hired Su Qing, a clock repairer from the city, to make it go again, and nobody in town seems to want her to. On her first night, the bell of the stopped clock rings once.
20 chapters · complete