The Pet Dragon: A Story about Adventure, Friendship, and Chinese Characters Hardcover – Picture Book, August 26, 2008

Great book, my son loves it

I'm a native Chinese speaker. I found this book great.My English-speaking kid is curious but overwhelmed by the difficulty of written Chinese. Even hiring a tutor didn't ease that "this is too hard" worry of a 5yo.This book did it. It is a very big book, visually pleasing, the story simple and interesting. 5yo giggled thru the book and almost immediately remembered at least 5 characters with precise recall.I don't care how much educational value it is, which is subjective anyway. The sparkling of interest to learn more is the most important thing. Thank you for this great book!

This beautifully illustrated book is the story of a girl and her pet dragon. He escapes his cage, and Lin sets out to find him. As Lin goes searching for him, she meets a witch who helps Lin on her journey until she finally finds the dragon with his family. Christoph Niemann cleverly incorporates the Chinese characters into the illustration, as well as defining it on the bottom of the page. He introduces the young reader to 33 characters. The one downside is that he does not have the pronunciation of each character.This book is a great way to introduce a young child to Chinese characters. They will love the story and not even realize that they are learning while reading the book.

We introduced this book to our daughter around 18 months, and ever since then its become her favorite book before bedtime. She follows the story well now, and at 21 months she's started to recognize words like "men" (door), "san" (mountain), "peng" (friend). I can read a little bit of chinese so that helps, but my husband can not so he does wish this book came with some pinyin for those who can't learn chinese. Nonetheless, the concept is wonderful. I wish there were more books like this!

My daughter is a 1st grader in a Mandarin immersion program. She was delighted with book because of how it relates pictures to Mandarin. She loves how the characters are incorporated into the pictures although some of the characters are not exactly the same as what she is learning in school. According to her the character for tree in the book is actually the character for wood. I don't speak Mandarin so I have to just assume what she is saying is correct, but I think other reviewers have mentioned similar issues.All in all, I wouldn't use the book to actually teach Mandarin, but I do think it is a great way to show the pictorial element of a beautiful language.

I am a director of a Preschool and we teach the Mandarin Language here. I ordered this book to add to our collection of story telling and was pleasantly surprised! This is a great book to start teaching the Chinese written characters and the children love love love this story! They even now can pick out the written characters in other written materials because of this book. The story is memorable. Author uses the Chinese character strokes over the pictures. Pictures are cute and story is entertaining.Highly recommend this book!!!

I have purchased 3 of these books in addition to the one we received as a gift. Daughter took this book to her classroom and all the kids loved it so we ended up donating the book to her class. I have heard other parents say that they also purchased this after seeing it in the classroom.

My almost 4 year likes me reading this book to her. It's a great way to introduce some Chinese characters to her and she enjoys learning them. She can relate the shapes of the characters to the meaning, which is really the point.