A Chinese podcast · Same story, 4 levels
克里斯蒂安·贝尔用了二十年，盖出十二栋房子，只为让寄养的兄弟姐妹不再被分开
Christian Bale Spent Twenty Years Building Twelve Houses So Foster Brothers and Sisters Would Stop Being Split Up
About this story
In the American foster system, a sibling group is harder to place than a single child, so the requirement that brothers and sisters stay together is usually the first thing dropped. Christian Bale spent close to twenty years on that one problem. Together California opened in Palmdale in September 2026: twelve furnished homes on roughly a thousand square metres, the first of its kind in the state, funded by nearly $9 million in donations. The first children move in in October. Chinese listening practice at four levels. HSK 2 Chinese listening practice.
This is an HSK 2 Chinese listening episode that runs about 3 minutes. The full Mandarin script is shown with tap-for-pinyin and a line-by-line English translation, so you can listen and read at once — comprehensible input in the sense of Stephen Krashen's i+1 theory. It teaches 12 key vocabulary words such as 孩子、地方、问题 and walks through 3 grammar patterns, each explained in English with examples. The same news story is retold at 4 difficulty levels — use the level selector above to find the version that is challenging but still understandable for you.
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原文Read the complete story in Chinese. Reveal pinyin and English only when you need them.
English transcript reference
Here is something a lot of people do not know.
In America, some children cannot live in their own homes.
It may be that their parents are gone, or that something else has happened at home.
These children have to go and live in someone else's house.
This is called foster care.
A foster home gives the child meals and a place to live.
That sounds all right.
But there is a problem inside it.
If a family has two children, or three, they very often cannot go to the same house.
The older brother goes to one family, the younger sister to another.
They had already left their own home.
And now they cannot even see their own brother or sister.
In America, it is rare for siblings to get to live together.
One man had been thinking about this for a long time.
His name is Christian Bale.
He is a very well-known film actor.
Many people have seen his films.
Bale, his wife, and a doctor friend of theirs did something about it together.
They wanted to build a place where these brothers and sisters could live together.
They worked on that idea for close to twenty years.
Twenty years is not a small number.
Over those twenty years they had to find land, find money, and find people.
Only two years ago did they actually start building.
This September, the houses were finished.
The place is in Palmdale, a small city in California.
Inside there are twelve houses in all.
Everything in them is new, and a child can move straight in.
This is the first place of its kind in California.
In October, the first children will move in.
The houses cost close to nine million dollars in total.
That money came from a great many people's donations; the government did not pay for it.
On the day the doors opened, Bale said something.
He said: there is grief in these children, and there is pain.
He said: turning that into love, into hope, into some idea of a future — that is our job.
A person can think about one thing for twenty years and then actually build it.
That alone is not easy.
If you had something right now that would take twenty years to finish, would you start?
Listen again
Try it without the transcript and notice what sounds clearer.
What vocabulary does this episode teach?
词汇HSK 2. 有的孩子不能住在自己家里 — the opening fact, said without euphemism.
HSK 2. 他们想做一个地方 — the goal, stated as concretely as it can be.
HSK 2. 可是这里面有一个问题 — the hinge between "sounds fine" and the real story.
HSK 2. 变成希望 — one of the three things Bale said the grief has to become.
HSK 2. 本来他们已经离开了自己的家 — 已经 is what makes the second loss land.
HSK 2. 这件事本身就不容易 — the episode's verdict, stated in the negative and left there.
Defined before it is named: 这些孩子要住到别人家去。这叫寄养。
A four-character compound covering all four relationships at once — there is no single word for "sibling" in English use here.
HSK 4. 一个很有名的电影演员 — 电影演员, not just 演员, because the distinction matters in Chinese.
这些钱来自很多人的捐款 — nine million dollars, none of it public money.
两年前，他们才开始盖房子 — 盖 is the verb for putting up a building; 做房子 would be wrong.
这些孩子心里有伤心，也有痛 — the first half of what Bale said has to be transformed.
* beyond level超纲词
What grammar patterns appear in this episode?
语法连……也……
Even X, not just the obvious things. 连 fronts the most extreme case, so the sentence lands harder than a plain negative would.
现在，他们连自己的哥哥妹妹也见不到了。
……才开始……
才 before the verb marks that something happened later than expected. Here it measures eighteen years of preparation against two of building.
两年前，他们才开始盖房子。
A 变成 B
To turn into, to become. Repeating 变成 across a list is how the quoted speech moves from what the children carry to what it should become.
把这些变成爱，变成希望，变成对以后的想法。
Proper Nouns
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