I thought this was an adorable book. I am a native Mandarin speaker, but my son was born in the US. I did not teach him Mandarin early enough, as he is now 3, and I wanted to gently steer him to some Mandarin options.This works - it has very few Mandarin words - basically, 26, one for each letter of the alphabet. The text combines Chinese and English - so A is for "Ai", the Chinese word for "love", with the character written in both traditional and simplified form. Each character is introduced with a rhyming descriptive paragraph (in English). There are some pronunciation guides and more explanatory notes in the back. Some of the characters were a stretch or didn't quite fit the letter, but overall it is a clever, warm, and gentle introduction to the language. It won't teach you how to converse in Chinese, for example, but it's purpose isn't that.