Winnie-the-Pooh in Chinese

小熊维尼 历险记

XiǎoxiOng wEinI lIxiǎn jI

A Translation of A. A. Milne's

"Winnie-the-Pooh" into Chinese

Chinese is spoken by more than one billion people. There are many varieties of Chinese. The best known are Mandarin, the official government language, and Cantonese also known as Guangdong Hua, spoken in Guangzhou and Hong Kong in Southern China.

The Ethnologue: Languages of the World lists 297 varieties of Chinese, which are really different languages because they are mutually unintelligible from each other.

However, the Chinese have created this wonderful invention, the Chinese written language, in which all varieties of spoken languages are written the same way. All Chinese people can read and write the same language even though they speak different languages.

There are varieties of that too. There is the traditional Chinese and there are different varieties of Simplified Chinese. However, nowadays almost all Chinese have converted to the Simplified Chinese that is used in this book.

This translation into Chinese is part of project to translate Winnie-the-Pooh into other languages. The idea is children need to learn to read at an early age and the best way to teach them to read is to provide reading materials that they find interesting. Children around the world laugh when they see Winnie-the-Pooh saying and doing silly things. Since Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book world-wide, translating this book into the different languages of the world will be conducive to teaching children to read in those languages.