七百字故事 (Qi Bai Zi Gushi or 700 Character Stories)
published by Guoyu Ribao (國語日報)
ISBN: 957751054-x

This book was written for Taiwanese children. It was not intended as a text book for foreigners studying Chinese. Still I have found it useful, although not perfect for my needs.

The book is made up of short stories. Most of the stories are traditional Chinese tales, although some are drawn from other cultures, too. That many of the stories are well known helps with reading as it makes it much easier to guess the meaning of new words and also to predict what is going to happen. Although the book was written for children I still find the stories interesting to read. Some of the stories contain some interesting references to Chinese history and culture.

The best thing about this book for language learners is the use of zhuyin fuhao (注音符號 or bo po mo fo) to annotate the entire text. This makes it easy to read the text out loud and also find words you don't know in the dictionary more quickly. A sample page of the text can be found here.

There is quite a wide range of vocabulary used in the book. My teacher said some of the words were a bit "old style" i.e. language that was used in the past in China, but is no longer in current usage in Taiwan. There are also some idioms (成語) used in the book.

This book is published by the Mandarin Daily News, aka Guoyu Ribao (國語日報). They publish many books for children that are annotated with zhuyin fuhao and they are a useful source of supplementary reading materials for intermediate to advanced learners. 

* adapted from several posts at David on Formosa (1 ), (2), (3 )