Chinese Audio Picture Book
Online Chinese picture book with mp3 audio files, to learn about 400 words in Chinese. The words are grouped into twelve themes — animals, colors, numbers, fruit, clothes, the human body and more.
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Shapes (8) -
Colors (12) -
Numbers (11) -
Nature (20) -
Vegetables (25) -
Fruits (29) -
Vehicles (23) -
The Human Body (36) -
Animals (47) -
Insects (23) -
Clothes (37) -
Household Objects (105)
Why pictures work for a first vocabulary
The slow part of learning a word in a new language is not memorising a sound, it is breaking the habit of going through your own language to reach it. A picture bypasses that step: you see the thing, you hear the Chinese, and nothing English stands between them. For concrete everyday vocabulary, which is what a beginner needs first, this is markedly faster than a bilingual list.
It matters more in Chinese than in most languages because of the tones. A word learned from a written list tends to be stored without its tone, or with a guessed one, and unlearning that later is harder than learning it right. Hearing each word said as you meet it fixes the tone with the word from the start.
The picture book covers the ordinary categories: food, animals, the body, the house, clothes, transport. Each word has its characters, its pinyin and its recording, and links to the dictionary for the full entry.