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 3 Chinese listening practice.
This is an HSK 3-4 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 影响、关系、解决 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
Start with a problem that sounds small but has very large effects.
In America, some children cannot go on living in their own homes, for all sorts of reasons.
They are then sent to a foster family.
What a foster family provides is the most basic set of things: a bed, three meals a day, an address from which they can go to school.
Structurally, the system is solving the question of where this child sleeps tonight.
The trouble starts when a whole group of siblings has to be placed at once.
Fitting one child into one family and fitting three children into the same family are completely different problems.
The result is that siblings staying together is rare in America.
An older brother goes to one family and a younger sister to another, possibly on the other side of the city.
There is a detail here that is easy to overlook.
These children have just lost the home they had.
And in the middle of losing it, the system also takes away the one relationship they had left.
One man kept this in mind for nearly twenty years.
His name is Christian Bale, and he is a very well-known film actor.
Around twenty years ago, he began paying attention to the sibling problem in foster care.
What he did goes considerably further than writing a cheque.
He, his wife, and a doctor friend who works at the University of California set up an organisation.
Their goal was very concrete: build a place where brothers and sisters can live under the same roof.
The goal sounds simple; carrying it out took twenty years.
Finding land, getting approvals, raising money, persuading the local government.
Construction only actually began two years ago.
This September, the houses were finished and opened.
The site is in Palmdale, California — a community of roughly a thousand square metres.
There are twelve houses in it, all fully furnished, so a child can move in and start living.
It is the first foster community of this kind in California.
In October, the first children move in.
The whole project raised close to nine million dollars in donations.
On opening day, Bale said a few words.
He said these children carry grief and pain inside them.
Turning that into love, into hope, into some expectation of a future, is the job of the adults around them.
Stretch the timeline out and the weight of this becomes visible.
Over twenty years, at any point where something went wrong, he could have stopped with his dignity intact.
When a famous person does charity, society is usually satisfied once they have given money and posed for a photograph.
He walked the rest of it.
Twelve houses is not many, and the number of children helped is limited.
But it proves one thing at least: within this system, siblings living together is possible.
If you had something right now that would take twenty years before you saw a result, would you start today?
Listen again
Try it without the transcript and notice what sounds clearer.
What vocabulary does this episode teach?
词汇HSK 3. 听起来很小、但影响很大的问题 — the frame the whole episode is built inside.
HSK 3. 拿走了他们仅剩的那个关系 — the most important noun in the episode.
HSK 3. 这套系统是在解决「这个孩子今晚住哪」— naming the only question the system actually answers.
HSK 3. 兄弟姐妹能留在一起的情况在美国很少见 — the statistic stated as a situation rather than a number.
HSK 2. 变成爱、希望，变成对未来的期待 — the second of the three things named.
HSK 3. 结果就是，兄弟姐妹能留在一起的情况在美国很少见。
接下来他们会被送到寄养家庭 — 寄养家庭 is the fixed term.
一组兄弟姐妹 — note the measure word 组, which is what makes them hard to place.
把一个孩子安排进一个家庭 — the administrative verb, which is exactly the register the system uses.
一起成立了一个机构 — what he built before he built any houses.
住在同一个屋檐下 — the standard Chinese idiom for living under one roof.
要找地，要办手续，要筹钱 — three of the twenty years' worth of obstacles, listed flat.
* beyond level超纲词
What grammar patterns appear in this episode?
语法把 A 安排进 B
The 把 construction fronts the object so the sentence is about what is done TO it. Placing a child is grammatically something done to them.
把一个孩子安排进一个家庭，和把三个孩子一起安排进同一个家庭，难度完全不同。
在……的同时，又……
At the same time as X, it also Y. Used to show one action producing two effects simultaneously, which is the cruelty being described.
而在他们失去家的同时，系统又顺手拿走了他们仅剩的那个关系。
做到……那一步
To get as far as a certain step. Naming the step makes it possible to say that someone stopped there — or did not.
一个名人做慈善，做到捐钱和拍照那一步，社会通常就已经满意了。
Proper Nouns
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