This book is very simple; it’s a kids book of the “let’s learn to count to 10” variety. It’s mostly simple pictures of dim sum or related items, appearing in amounts in ascending order. Besides the food theme, and colorful basic art, this counting book is in Mandarin Chinese. It’s got both the characters and the words written out for how to say “one menu” up to “ten fortune cookies”, Each page has three panels, one for the English word and Arabic numeral, one for the Chinese character and word, and one for a) the food name in English, b) a picture, and then c) in Chinese characters, and finally Chinese transcribed into English letters.
As far as I can tell, it’s a cute way to teach the numbers and a little vocabulary. The one thing missing, that I wish it had, was how to pronounce the Chinese words. Could I ask Google? Sure, but if this book is supposed to teach counting to someone who presumably knows one of the two languages, why is there no guide for speaking the other?
Based on my general knowledge of lanauge, I’m having to guess at some of the grammar as well. The number in the third panel is in white in both character and transcription, so for example, “wu gen chunjuan” is probably {number-preposition for ‘of’- egg rolls} [and for any literalists/purists out there, yes, I do know I’ve left off some diacritical markers, but I don’t know how to do them in Chinese in my word processor.]
Did I look this up sheerly for the ‘O’ square? Yes, yes I did. I’m also kind of glad since it is one the one hand incredibly simple, and take about 2 minutes to read, but it’s also got enough interesting things to consider (if you’re a little bit of a language nerd anyways) that there’s also some fun things to think about or consider looking up. Like how I can’t tell what the character for ‘ge’ is, since there’s no repeats from segment to segment that I can tell in the characters. Maybe that’s one of those words that doesn’t have a character, but is presumed? Or maybe it varies in context somehow? Does it matter? Not a ton, but I’m curious. Could I look it up, or ask my sister-in-law who is a native speaker? Probably. Am I going to actually any of that? Who knows…