English · Beginner
Read Shen of the Sea in Englishwith every sentence explained
Arthur Bowie Chrisman · 1925
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Shen of the Sea by Arthur Bowie Chrisman was first published in 1925. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 38,300 words.
Mischievous boys, clever cooks and lazy heroes who change the world by accident.
Shen of the Sea is a collection of fifteen playful tales set in an old, half-legendary China of kings, dragons, demons and wise old men. They are not traditional folk tales but Arthur Bowie Chrisman's own inventions, told in a teasing, storyteller's voice, and many of them explain, with a wink, how everyday things first came to be.
In "Ah Mee's Invention", a naughty boy and some jam-smeared carvings stumble on a quick new way of making books. In "That Lazy Ah Fun", a good-for-nothing son and his doctor father discover something that scares away demons with a bang. And in "Ah Tcha the Sleeper", a greedy young master, cursed by a witch to sleep almost all day, finds the leaves of a magic brew we still drink today.
Funny and quick to read, Shen of the Sea won the Newbery Medal in 1926.
- Author
- Arthur Bowie Chrisman
- First published
- 1925
- Language
- English
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children, Fantasy
- Length
- About 38,300 words
How it opens
“A shamelessly rainy day, my honorable Brother Chi.”
“That is truth, esteemed Brother Cha. It rains perfectly hard. There will be plenty of leisure in which to beat the children.”
Ching Chi was merely quoting an old Swa Tou saying. Every one knows that on rainy days old and young are crowded, arm against elbow, in the house; often to get in each the other’s way—and misunderstandings are likely to arise. Then the bamboo is brought into play—and there are wailings. That is how the Swa Tou saying originated. When Ching Chi used it, he did so in fun, and, no doubt, to make talk.
Reading Shen of the Sea in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of English and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
