A Sherlock Holmes favorite adapted into a Chinese context
To be honest, to the best of my recollection, I haven’t read any Sherlock Holmes stories, but I have watched a number of episodes of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” starring Jeremy Brett on PBS.
Of the modern versions of Sherlock Holmes, I prefer “Sherlock” starring Benedict Cumberbatch over “Elementary” the CBS version starring Johnny Lee Miller.
Well, Mandarin Companion has thrown its hat into the ring too with their version of Sherlock Holmes with an adaptation of the story “The Red Headed League”.
Mandarin Companion takes well-known stories and modifies them with a Chinese setting. The characters are given actual Chinese names rather than transliterating them from English into Chinese. Most of the time I think that is a good method, but in this case I don’t.
In this story, Sherlock Holmes is given the name 高明 (Gaō Míng). According to my eChineseLearning teacher, Sherlock Holmes is known from the movies as “夏洛克.福尔摩” (Xià luòkè. Fú ěr mó).
That’s a bit long, but I think here, Mandarin Companion would have done well to at least call him 夏洛克. Emma was called “安末”，so I don’t think I’m being unreasonable.
This story is set in Shanghai rather than London during the 1920s. During the 1920’s Shanghai was known as “The Paris of the East, the New York of the West.” Of course, the only redheads you would find in China would be foreigners, so the storyline was adapted to use curly headed Chinese, which are about as common as redheads are in the West.
Since “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Curly Haired Company” 《卷发公司的案子》 is an adaptation of a story you might very well be familiar with, I won’t recount the plot since the original and the adaptation are pretty much the same. However, Mandarin Companion did a bang up job with the story and I really enjoyed it.
I read this book on my Kindle
The introduced vocabulary is linked to the index for easy reference as is the table of contents. So it is easy to navigate through the book. I also have a few Chinese Breeze books for Kindle and think Mandarin Companion’s books are easier to use.
But after buying a few Kindle books, for the purposes of learning Chinese, I decided to go with the paperback version. I can make annotations in the margins in a much more convenient way than I could with the Kindle version.
How to make the most of “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Curly Haired Company” 《卷发公司的案子》
This is a level one graded reader, so if you have a knowledge of 300 foundational Chinese characters you should be able to enjoy this book. Graded readers are designed to take what you have been exposed to and repeat grammar and vocabulary in a natural way. So as you are reading this book, you mind will be able to more naturally process the story naturally.
After completing a chapter, I suggest you go to the index and read through the index questions. Try your best to answer them. This will reinforce your learning.
Before you read the book, I also suggest that you make flashcards from the key words in the index and review them several times. That way when you encounter the word for the first time in the text, it wouldn’t be totally new to you.
Unfortunately, this story doesn’t have some of the other features such as references to grammar constructs that are found in other Mandarin Companion books. Probably because this was one of their first graded readers.
Final thoughts about “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Curly Haired Company” 《卷发公司的案子》
If you are studying Chinese on your own or in a class room setting, you may feel some frustration about your progress. I strongly suggest that you get your hands on as many graded readers as possible.
Why? Because research has shown that extensive reading in a foreign language speeds up vocabulary acquistion. Understanding grammar constructs becomes more natural as the brain is trained to automatically process them. Books such as “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Curly Haired Company” 《卷发公司的案子》 are a pleasant way to expand your knowledge of Chinese. Get a copy and start reading today!
