My daughter loves this book and it's an excellent way to teach Chinese symbols.

As someone with a 4-year-old, and who has gone through all the steps to create a children's book and get it published, I have a growing appreciation for this genre. It is truly an art that most have no idea about. Christoph Niemann has already built a following for his beautiful illustrations, and The Pet Dragon: A Story about Adventure, Friendship, and Chinese Characters is no exception. The illustrations captured me and my 4-year-old's attention. Beyond that, I enjoyed this book because I live...

What a cool book! And who knew that my son already read it at school and knew the Chinese characters? (I was very pleased. The school is totally worth my money!)Although I think some of the Chinese characters were inaccurate (or not what I learned), I did appreciate the pictures making the Chinese characters make more sense. I enjoyed all the pictures and the story was interesting.Very excited!

A delightful book about a pet dragon that also introduces children to Chinese characters.

Check out more Picture book reviews @ Perspective of a Writer...A playful introduction to written Chinese characters... Lin receives a gift of a baby dragon... when he disappears one day after many days of fun, Lin goes in search of him and we learn more characters as the story progresses!The idea for this book was quite ingenious. It's not meant to teach you to say the words or even really learn words to use in a conversation. It is simply to make written Chinese characters accessible to child

Story wise, the book was just so-so. What I did think was great about the book is how the illustrator integrates Chinese characters into the illustrations in a way that makes the characters understandable. I found that once I had read the book I could identify some of the characters on the last page. I think this book would be a great addition for collections that need preschool-early grade school titles on China.

I LOVE this picture book. I love the concept which aligns perfectly with my own visual approach to the world and, I suspect, many children's also. (That of finding visual cues everywhere to help understand and learn things.) My 9 year old son loves the book as well and took great delight in re-reading it when he saw I had it out from the library again. The illustrations are delightful, work perfectly and have great style and design sense. The story is simple and follows the fairytale tradition,

Fantastic book design and illustration, but the story was convoluted and confusing and didn't match up very well to the clever premise of Chinese character interpretation. I so wanted to give this five stars, too- very cool concept.

Cute, imaginative, and I daresay very effective method for learning some Chinese characters.

With Chinese characters as the inspiration, this book tells the story of a lost dragon.

Very creative book. It was just disappointing that the Chinese characters that were taught didn't necessarily go with the story. For example, the story is about a pet dragon, but we are never taught "dragon." A few more examples: On the page about ping-pong, we are taught "middle." The page about a ball, we are taught "eye." The walking pages teach "gate," "work," and "mountain." All of the characters are taught in the pictures, so maybe the characters for the words I would like to see don't go

When my daughter was learning Chinese in high school, she used to have a character book in which she would write each character she had to learn that day over and over. Each character, she would tell me, is like a picture of its meaning. And when you read Christoph Niemann's cleverly written book The Pet Dragon, you can really see how true that it. The story is simple - a young girl, Lin, is given a pet baby dragon as a gift. Lin and the dragon do everything together, but when the dragon shatter...

The colors and forms of the illustrations are definitely extremely eye-pleasing. The subject matter (Chinese characters/words) is definitely in high demand these days. However, I find the "story" very forced (where did that green witch pop into the story? And a Pet Dragon is definitely NOT a very Chinese concept. Dragons are not cute little creatures to have as friends! I blame Disney's Mulan for this belittling of a powerful mythical being.)It is also odd that there is no reference whatsoever t...

This reminds me of the pedestrian "tell and draw" you often find in storytelling books. The language is stilted and the plot disjointed.People with an interest in Chinese characters will find this useful. But as a picture book, it falls flat.

Pretty pictures, some chinese characters shown in the picture, but all in all, I'm not too impressed. The story depth was rather thin even for children books.

Lin receives a baby dragon. They become fast friends, but when the dragon breaks a valuable vase Lin's father banishes him to a cage. The next morning, the dragon is gone and Lin searches high and low to find him. Along the way, she helps an old woman across a river. In payment for her kindness, the old woman eats a magic bean and lifts Lin up to the sky where she finds her friend the dragon living with other dragons. The two friends play and the dragon returns Lin to her home, where her father

This is such a great idea! The story + the illustrations with the characters superimposed over them is an incredible way to help teach a new language to anyone, but especially to little ones. Even if this book only covers a few basic words, it exposes children to the concept of language learning in a fun way and makes it something as commonplace as reading before bed! I sure hope there’s more of these kinds of books floating around, and not just for Chinese characters.

PERHAPS it is because I love symbols, but reading this book out loud to my little grandson, was such an adventure for me. All the pictures were overlaid on a Chinese Character. I will always remember river and mountain, and perhaps, man, woman, witch, mouth, eye, dragon. I thought this book was truly fun.