Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!!!

This is a wonderful first introduction to chinese characters for kids. The story is cute, the illustrations are very attractive and fitting the characters into the pictures is a great neumonic. The only thing that left my child reader frustrated was 'daddy, how do you pronounce those characters?' A pinyin pronounciation guide underneath or even at the end would have made this good book great.

I love this book! It is a large format so my son has a lot to look at and does not get as easily distracted as he does with smaller books. The pictures are also high contrast. I enjoy the illustration a great deal myself. And did I mention the clever integration of the Chinese characters into the illustration. I'm not sure yet how much my son has learned but it has taught me a lot. Great book!

I got this book to help my son keep his interest in Chinese (I'm a first generation Chinese)and was hoping I could teach him a few words, but I was disappointed to find that though some of it could be used for that purpose and it's an ok children's story, some of the words chosen were just inaccurate. For example, the Chinese character for "wood" was shown as the word for "tree" - although, I suppose in some arcane way it may have been used for "tree" it is not how it would be used normally. And some of the words - like the single character that the book used for "friend" would never be used on it's own by a Chinese speaker - the Chinese translation for "friend" requires 2 words. There were several other words that fall into the same categories that I just mentioned - enough that I don't feel like this would be a good book to teach him Chinese. And it's not good enough of a story to have around just as a story book.

I do appreciate that the book calls to attention that Chinese is a hieroglyphic based language, i.e. the words almost always had some graphical basis in the items or ideas they represent.

I bought this book as a present and had to read it first for myself. The book's illustrations help you understand the Chinese characters and bring the story together. After one look through, i was already testing myself on which characters I had learned. You'll be surprised at how fast you can pick up on it. I definitely recommend this book for you, your child or as an awesome present!

This book incorporates traditional Chinese characters in its illustrations to teach young readers how to associate a Chinese character to its meaning. But, it does not show or teach how the Chinese characters are to be pronounced. Still, I think it is a good introduction to Chinese for children who may be interested in exploring ways to learn the language. I bought one for my five year-old son, and another copy for his school library.

This book is very well done - an excellent and appropriate story with simple, bold but interesting illustrations and I have given it to many of my friends to aide teaching of their young children. Parent and child alike love the book and it is highly effective, even with children as young as 2 years of age! I appreciate too that the story background is Chinese in origin. My only lament is that the book did not also offer Pinyin guidance for non-native Mandarin speakers. I hope there may be additional volumes to come!

The Pet Dragon: A Story about Adventure, Friendship, and Chinese Characters
The Pet Dragon cunningly combines a charming story and fun illustrations with a visual guide to simple Chinese characters. There are three to four thousand characters in the Chinese language, and many of them are little icons representing their meaning. Niemann has incorporated a collection of these characters into the illustrations for this story in a way that shows their resemblance to the things or ideas that they symbolize. In this way he provides a simple and enjoyable introduction to the distinctive Chinese system of writing.

The story itself follows the adventures of little Lin and her pet baby dragon. The two of them do everything together, until the day they break a vase while playing soccer in the house. Lin's father insists that the dragon must now stay in a cage, but the next morning Lin finds that her dragon has escaped. Lin sets off on an adventure to find her friend, and in the end both the two friends, and Lin and her father, are happily reunited. This book can be enjoyed by children both for its story and for its unusual presentation of Chinese writing, and is a fun read for dads and kids together at either level.

The Pet Dragon is a story about a girl and her pet baby dragon. They have fun together until one day he dragon goes missing. The girl goes out in search of her pet dragon only to find him all grown up and living amongst other dragons. The story is entertaining, but what makes this book interesting is its use of Chinese characters. The Chinese characters are incorporated into the illustrations to show what they represent. This could be a useful device for memorizing the difficult characters through visualizing pictures. The first thing my daughter did after reading this book is she started copying each of the Chinese characters. She then asked how to say each word in Chinese. This book caught her interest right away and has been a great learning tool for both language and art.

I am Chinese and my daughter is mixed so I have been looking for books to teach her how to speak chinese. This book is pretty useless for this purpose - There is no pinyin so it shows you one or two Chinese characters on each page, the english meaning, but it does not show you how to pronounce it in Chinese!!!! There is a book called Gordon and Li Li and it's awesome!