Business Chinese (BCT-A) Graded Reader Short Stories With Audio

Short stories for practicing Business Chinese listening and reading - June 6, 2026

We're excited to release our first collection of Business Chinese stories aimed at the BCT-A level.

The BCT (商务汉语考试 / Shāngwù Hànyǔ Kǎoshì) is China's official Business Chinese Test, built by the same organization behind the HSK. It measures how well you can use Chinese in a real workplace — meetings, clients, phone calls, emails, and everyday office life — rather than in a classroom.

The test is split into tiers. BCT-A is the entry tier (Levels 1–3), built on a reference vocabulary of about 600 words and focused on daily office communication. It covers listening, reading, and writing. If you already know your way around HSK 1–2 and want to start working in a Chinese-speaking environment, BCT-A is the natural next step.

These stories are designed to bridge that gap. They use simple, HSK-friendly sentence structure you already recognize, but seed in the business vocabulary that everyday office life actually requires — words like 会议 (meeting), 客户 (client), 报告 (report), 名片 (business card), and 加班 (work overtime). As with all our graded readers, the audio is clear and slightly slower than natural speech, so you can follow along and shadow each line.

Each story below includes the Chinese text, word-spaced pinyin, and a literal English breakdown. Tap any word to add it to your deck, then review it with spaced repetition before you forget it.