Chinese Bookshop.com

We are based in London, United Kingdom and offer a huge range of materials for people learning Chinese, Chinese books both fiction and non-fiction and books about China. It can be tricky finding Chinese books online, especially if Chinese is not your first language and we wanted to simplify this process and make it as easy as possible.

Learning Chinese

It’s difficult when you first start learning Chinese to know where to start. We’d recommend that you first focus on either Chinese speaking & listening or Chinese reading & Chinese writing then work on the other skill afterwards. In our experience of learning Chinese, the textbooks that propose to teach all four disciplines of Chinese are not always the best and it’s often better to buy separate textbooks when you first start out. When first learning Chinese, getting a textbook that helps you understand Chinese pinyin is a great start as this will enable you to use dictionaries and later type using an IME on a computer or on a phone. We’d also recommend a chinese textbook about learning the stroke order; the stroke order is very important for using electronic dictionaries and helps you remember more characters. We also have some Chinese dictionaries which are useful as a way of starting your Chinese learning progress. Sometimes podcasts can be an useful learning method, and we really recommend ChinesePod. We have a large selection of learn Chinese textbooksand we're sure that you'll find what you are looking for at Chinese bookshop.

We have one of the largest selections of Kids Chinese books, DVDs, software and other learning materials. We have magnets for children to use when learning Chinese, books with different radicals for children, exciting games for children to learn Mandarin, bilingual Mandarin-English books for children, Kids Chinese flashcards. If you make learning Chinese fun, then your children will be much more likely to want to get involved. Many primary schools in the United Kingdom are now offering Chinese for young learners. The sooner that your children start learning Chinese, the more benefit they will experience!

Books translated into Chinese

Our key area of difference from many bookshops is our huge variety of books translated into Chinese. We know that when you want to read a Chinese book, you want to read a book that you find INTERESTING. As such, we have lots of popular fiction books translated into Chinese. Our books are in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters to provide the biggest choice of Chinese books. We have children’s books translated into Chinese with pinyin and the Taiwanese romanisation Zhuyin. Some of the authors that we have translated into Chinese: Agatha Christie, Laura Ingalls-Wilder, J K Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, Erin Hunter and hundreds more!

Traditional characters are used in Taiwan and Hong Kong and by many overseas Chinese and we have lots of books in traditional characters. In the UK, a leading newspaper written using traditional Chinese characters is Sing Tao Daily.

Our pinyin books might be suitable for learners of Chinese who can use the pinyin as a ‘crutch’ to help you understand the Chinese.

Original Chinese books

These books were originally written in Chinese and have some of the most popular modern Chinese authors. These include Eileen Chang, Tang Su Lan, Jimmy Liao, He Ma and Ge Bing. We’ve also got lots of Chinese graphic novels as well as non-fiction Chinese books.

The Four Great Historical Novels

This is the name for the books that are the most well-known Chinese historical books and they are: Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Outlaws of the Marsh and Dream of the Red Chamber. We’ve got copies of all these books in Chinese as well as English and some of them have got pinyin. The original text will be tricky for people who haven’t studied Chinese for a long time but the versions which have been shortened and simplified might be suitable for intermediate learners of Chinese. The English version is always possible for people who want to appreciate the fantastic Chinese classics.

Books in English

China is a huge country and Chinese culture is very interesting. There are more and more people who want to learn about Chinese culture and so we’re very pleased that we can offer a huge selection of books in English about Chinese culture. We have some wonderful translations of original Chinese literature, Chinese culture books, Chinese-English mirror books and Chinese medicine books. We also have the wonderful Library of Chinese Classics series. This series is unusual in the way that many different Chinese publishers have co-operated together to create the series, with one publishing house publishing only a few of the books.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is becoming more and more popular in the world in general. We have Chinese medicine books so that you can learn about TCM, practise TCM and understand the culture behind Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Why do we need Chinese textbooks? Many people believe that a teacher is all that is required and a Chinese textbook is not something that they'd need. We disagree, Chinese textbooks can provide a targetted and disciplined way to learn Chinese. A textbookcan focus your Chinese learning, whether it's a Mandarin or Cantonese. You can also use your textbook at home or with a teacher, by working at home self-study can improve your Chinese much quicker than you would otherwise.

Do we have other sites? Of course we do, we have the following two sites:英国中文书店 which offers our selection of books and is all in Chinese. We also have Chinese bookstore which is aimed at the USA market and priced in dollars. The pricing on all three sites is the same and on this site you can also search for (most items) in Chinese and find the English listings. We believe in making Chinese books as accessible as possible to the widest market and will be starting new localised sites very shortly.