The Pet Dragon: A Story about Adventure, Friendship, and Chinese Characters

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 is an excellent introduction to Chinese characters for anyone! My young children and I are going through it together to work on our characters. I only wish it had the pinyin for the words as well as the characters.

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.

My kid could read 35 Chinese words through the book.It is interesting and useful.

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.

My 3.5 year-old loves how the chinese characters are integrated into the illustrations. By the 3rd reading, she wanted to tell ME what the characters meant, and to my pleasant surprise, she is now able to point out a good number of the characters in other chinese books she has, in restaurant and store signs, etc.I would give this book 5 stars if pin yin was also included, beneath the character descriptions at the bottom of the page.Please, Mr. Niemann, keep churning out more of these chinese character books (and include the pin yin!) We love this one. The illustrations, type and book design are gorgeous--so much more aesthetically pleasing than most other kiddie language books out on the market.

This was a present for a 6 yr old. His mother teaches Chinese at a nearby college. She found it an excellent introduction to the language.

I love this book. I'm a Mandarin teacher and I use this book to introduce young children to Chinese characters. The hard back version is worth buying. Unfortunately, right now I am remote teaching and thought I could buy the Kindle edition to use with my students over Zoom. If the book is well formatted for Kindle, when I share my screen it will look the same as the hardback edition. That is not how this book is formatted. It looks clunky and you can barely see the pictures - which are the main part of the book.

Simple, beautiful drawings. Good to teach children that there are other ways to represent human writing other than the alphabet, namely Mandarin. The drawing behind the character makes it clear for them..

A fun way for both kids and those of us young at heart, to take out first step in learning Chinese.

This is a Great Book! I was charmed by its review in the NY Times...bought it for myself as I have Chinese wife and thought perhaps it would help me learn to read Chinese (a little) but when I gave it to my Chinese grandchildren it became a favorite book and I had to buy another copy because it was so read and enjoyed and continues to be. Our 3 year old reads it almost every day!

Lovely book. Arrived quickly and in good condition.

as described.