Customer Reviews

My Dad and Me

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I saw these books (My Dad and Me, My Mom and Me) this weekend at a book fair. I was interested as my son and I are learning multiple languages, esp French (we are in Quebec) and Mandarin (he is adopted from China)... but noticed that both the "baba" in the Dad book and the "mama" in the Mom book in Mandarin are wrong. How can an author, editor and publisher all get such simple words, only one word per book in several languages, wrong? Yes it is baba in Mandarin, but it is the 4th, falling, tone on the 1st "a" and a neutral tone on the second, not the 2nd, rising tone on both "a"s in baba: "The rhyming verse on each spread offers a multicultural slant: the first father is called "dad," the next "papi" (with the note papi means "dad" in Spanish), followed by aba (Hebrew), bábá (Mandarin), and bapa (Hindi).

This is something so simple, so elementary, in every single "first Chinese words" book, textbook, dvd, cd for kids or adults. One can find it in seconds on google. I cannot imagine writing that and bothering to put the wrong accents (which make it a completely different word, with different meaning, like saying "the camel was in the desert" or "Don't desert me!"

bábá (Mandarin) isn't even a word in my chinese dictionary, though bá (Mandarin) itself can mean "pull out" "lift or raise" "capture" "trudge over mountains" "target" or "domineering/bossy"... it certainly never means dad or father.

It would be better to not bother putting out multilingual books if you can't get it right. This isn't a hard text, nor one word typo out of a whole dictionary. It is just "Dad" in a couple languages. Big fail. (and it is bad enough to get the dad book wrong, but the mom book as well?? Maybe they have "my dog and me" and write the dog word in mandarin wrong too?)

Why teach us incorrect words? Pay an author, an illustrator, an editor, a printer, to put out a book that has such blatant errors. I would never buy it or read it to my kid, as if the Mandarin is wrong, the chances are that the spanish, hebrew and hindi are also wrong, and I could be saying something horrid to someone in another language by using what this supposedly sweet kid's book is teaching us.