Not being a Chinese language expert, I had an Chinese ESL specialist from our district look at this book to give me her take 0n this publication.  The Basics explains the four tones of Mandarin along with a graph of “It Sounds Like”, with consonants, vowels, and vowel combinations.  Each phrase is presented in English, Chinese characters and pinyin transliteration.  The phrases are organized into themes such as, Schools, Meals, Months, Seasons, etc.  Bright, colorful, digital, illustrations add to the visual appeal.  Unfortunately, frequent typos in the pinyin transliteration make it questionable to have this title on the shelf.  Errors like extra letters, wrong letters, missing letters, as well as incorrect tone marks appear in about seven different places throughout the text.  I ended up making the corrections right in the book with a black pen, instead of not adding the book to our collection.  Aside from the errors (which were corrected in an unorthodox way), the ESL specialist thought the book was still worth having.