First Comments

Gaelic(scots) should be changed to Scottish Gaaelic due to the confusing with Scots a seperate language in Scotland totally unrelated. the redirect also makes the mistake with Scots(Gaelic).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_in_the_world

is an article that has been posted on Votes for deletion on wikipedia, on the ground that it is not really encylopedic. Does anyone think we should copy it over here ? Theresa knott 16:41, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I say, yeah, bring it over, I don't know why they want to delete it. Although it does not fit in any specific book right now it could be in a common area between different language books. --Karl Wick

It's been removed from VfD btw. Dysprosia 01:57, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)

In that case there is no longer any urgency. I wont port it over just yet because people are working on it over there. I'll wait a while 'till they get it nearer to pefection first. Theresa knott 11:33, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)

What are the general guidelines for language bookshelf authors? should we present here linguistic analisys style books, or self-learn languages guide with dialogs and such?

What about Elvish? Anyone interested in starting a page? I guess the font would be a problem but is there a way to get around that with images perhaps? Just a random suggestion... Drunkasian 05:58, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I would like to see it (klingon's already there), and will add it to the requested list. On an unrelated note, BorkBorkBork!, if it is appropriate for wikibooks at all, is not a real language (and I don't mean real as in non-fictional, I mean that it is not a en:language. It is an idiosyncratic method of speaking used by a single fictional character. I am removing it from this list.). TUF-KAT

What's the point in learning Elvish? I don't see many elves around here that speak it.

Do you see elves that speak a different language? :) Anyway, it's a real language that some people do learn, and I don't see any reason why Wikibooks can't cover it. I'm less certain of the newly-created Tsan language wikibook, since it is a homegrown invented language deleted from Wikipedia for non-encyclopedicness. TUF-KAT 22:18, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Relation with wiktionary

I'm thinking about the relations of this to Wiktionary. A good bilingual would be a great language resource. feel we can do more than make wiki textbooks.

I'm trying to focus a few ideas around that on meta:Wiki Language School. It would be something in a more dictionary / encyclopedia format - very browseable, but with focus on teachign rather than definitions. So the actual contents may actually look more like what's in a textbook.

Comments welcome - oh, and is there a page on wikibooks that talks about this kind of things ? Flammifer 19:20, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Common resources

I am working on French Sign Language over in fr:Langue des signes française, and I was wondering

• if there are any ASL (American SL) or BSL (British SL) speakers here who would like to work with me to build common resources
• if any of these resources could be shared by languages (i.e. comics to describe, stories to translate, etc)

-- Kowey 11:24, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The Fox language

I was serching around, when I saw a language called Fox in the unfinished section. What kind of language is Fox?

IALs versus artlangs

Might international auxiliary languages and artlangs be divided into separate sections? Their purposes and audiences are very different.

ural-altaic

could we list Japanese and Korean according to family? especially since Chinese is listed under Sino-Tibetan. Nateji77 22:36, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

Language families unhelpful?

Anybody else feel that language categories for this bookshelf are unhelpful? I found them much easier to scan and find the language I was looking for before they were categorized into groups like ROMANCE, Q-CELTIC or OTHER INDO-EUROPEAN. If I would make one division, it would be between natural languages and constructed languages, but other than that the divisions make things harder to find.

Think about our users here and what they would reasonably expect to see. Most people know less than half of those language families, so grouping would be an encumbrance to them. --Everlong 18:27, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Agree. --Singkong2005 04:08, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Agree. I also find the level of categorisation by "family" employed (i.e. how do you define family?) very arbitrary, e.g. "Q-Celtic" is not a language family, it is a subranch of a branch (Celtic) of a family (Indo-European): why choose to categorise at that particular level? Maybe someone will disagree with me there, but that is precisely my point: the decisions are debatable, hence (at least potentially) arbitrary, providing one more argument for getting rid of the categorisation. --A R King 08:14, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Disagree. I accept anyone without specialist knowledge would perhaps not be familiar with all the family/branch etc. hierarchies, but I think a simple alphabetical list completely removes the possibility for people to learn about these distinctions and possibly lead them in directions which are intellectually stimulating. I read often in User talk pages about how people follow random link after random link and become interested in subjects they were previously unaware of. To take away the categorisation is to restrict access to knowledge, not increase it. I accept the division between Q-celtic and P-celtic could come across as an excessive concentration on differences that in world terms are relatively small, but I think the main point is this: To be simply looking at the languages bookshelf means you have some interest in languages and so it is only natural to find out the answers to curiosities that jump out at them. To name but a few: Why are Welsh and Irish in different "branches"? Why is Basque not in any group? Arbitary maybe, but none the less interesting to anyone with an interest in languages. Kijog 21:43, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

To be clear, I only meant to argue for the removal of categorizations in the little {{bookshelf|Languages bookshelf}} box up top. The family/branch grouping is a very good thing for the organization of the Languages Bookshelf page, but not for a small box.

It shows up on many pages and should be just a quick reference with organization that is easily understood by someone wishing to browse popular or developed language texts. I do not think it should be the job of a bookshelf to serve as a primer on etymology. Think of the user here and their likely expectations and search strategies. Alphabetical order is quick to recognize, but the family groupings make most languages harder to find (just try finding Arabic, Finnish or Irish without having to read through half the box first). As a bonus, we'd also free up another line so that more books could be featured. --Everlong 19:12, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree with you on that basis; it would be good to include extra languages and give them a chance to be seen by casual browsers Kijog 16:57, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Some wikibooks need serious improvement

Somebody needs to finish the Czech language wikibook that they started over a year ago, at least add a vocabulary list or something, or announce that it is totally blank.

Mongolian

Could we add Mongolian as a suggested book under Altaic languages? Waitak 02:54, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

New approach for courses

A while ago I developed a new approach for language courses and today I had the idea that it might be a very helpful for people who are thinking of writing a new language course here and who don't have a background in didactics. I explained it in detail at Bite-sized language lessons. I haven't yet created a course on Wikibooks using that approach, but you can get on idea of what it might look like by going to e. g. this lesson on my personal website and I plan to transfer the German lessons there to Wikibooks so that more people can contribute and benefit from them. What do you think? (Best use the discussion page of the Wikibooks article I linked to, wouldn't want to take up all the space here)
Junesun 18:47, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

That's a great techique, but German is already so developed, with in its lesson plans and teaching techique, but can create a new German book, Like "Alternative German." --German Men92 04:05, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I decided to create a new German book. It's now available as BLL German and I'll keep adding to it. Anybody else is welcome to contribute, too. If you would like to help, please consult this page on contributing, which explains in detail what you could do. Junesun 18:54, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Pama-Nyungan languages

What about the native languages of Australia, any interest here? Pama-Nyungan languages. 58.107.196.209 06:48, 21 December 2006 (UTC)correct person is Enlil Ninlil 06:51, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

List of books

Is there any way of keeping the list of books updated automatically by category templates? I notice that some that are on the Languages bookshelf template aren't on the the complete list below - Irish & Finnish to name a couple Kijog 22:06, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Hungarian language classification problem

Hungarian is listed as Finno-Ugric, while Finnish has a separate part as Baltic-Finnic. Baltic-Finnic is part of Finno-Ugric, and Hungarian belongs to the Ugric subfamily, both Finno-Ugric. See on the wikipedia article . I'd change it myself, but the page is locked. 84.3.187.90 17:23, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Criteria for inclusion

Just wondering - are there any explicit criteria to decide what books get included in the template and which don't? I've look around but haven't discovered an answer, and none seems obvious just from looking at the list. Who if anyone is "in charge" of deciding what to include? If there were a bit of transparency about this I might be willing to offer some help (if it is wanted) making the template list better. At present I'm afraid it looks a bit chaotic to me. --A R King 06:59, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Adding Miskito

I want to add Miskito to this bookshelf but don't know how it is classified. Also, the system seems slightly confused as mentioned above. Poppy 20:29, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Poppy. Thank you for adding the templates and looking into the bookshelf issue. I'm not keeping a close watch on the page right now (because of a minor health mishap, but I'll be back soon!), but I'll try to keep track and help if I can. Cheers, --A R King 10:58, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Mongolian

Can someone please add Mongolian? I'm interested in learning some. Thanks.--68.54.253.180 16:35, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

See your talk page for reply--Uzbekscholar 08:36, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Rohingya miscategorized.

"Rohingya" is not a constructed language. It is an Indo-European (specifically, eastern Indo-Aryan) language spoken by the Muslim Rohingya people in Myanmar. It needs to be moved.

Uzbek

I'm starting up a Uzbek Wikibook, how do I get it listed? Or must i finish a first draft first?--Uzbekscholar 07:38, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I found out the sections actually do have editing ability :) --Uzbekscholar 20:26, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Concerning Miskito: featured book

Hi everyone. I have a few things to say, but I'll do it under two headings to facilitate separate discussion of them (if there is any). First of all, I'd like to say that the Miskito language course I've been working on (as time permits; not much lately) has been made a featured book. I'm still not sure what the whole process leading to that is, but I'd like to thank whoever supported that decision, and also take the opportunity to invite anybody who's interested in such things to give their feedback on what they think of the (unfinished) course's design and content, since I think it's a bit innovative in the Wikibooks context. I'd be glad to discuss matters anybody might like to bring up, time permitting. Cheers, Alan --A R King 06:42, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

A few things about the bookshelf

There are serious problems with the way languages are ordered/classified in the bookshelf - both in the smaller template at the top and in the main list. The points I will raise have already been touched on higher up on this page (but not resolved, I think, and certainly not satisfactorily in my opinion), and I think they do need attention.

I'll start with a practical point. In the template at the top, as it is presently organised, there is NO PLACE to put Miskito (or any other American Indian language): they simply haven't been alotted a place. Perhaps this is simply because until now there were no American Indian language courses considered worth including in the template, so it wasn't necessary to have a category. In principle, therefore, the problem could easily be solved by adding a new category.

That, however, leads to my second point, which is that the choice of currently existing categories is somewhat inconsistent because it mixes two different ways of classifying languages: by language family and by geographical area.

Most of the template goes by the former: thus we have various branches of Indo-European (taking up more than half of the entire list), followed by some other families (e.g. Finno-Ugric, Turkic) or sub-families (e.g. Semitic, Chinese). That's okay in principle, as long as we realise that the (sub)-families present do not cover all the world's languages and will therefore have to be repeatedly revised to make room for new additions not accommodated by the present categories. For example: (1) as I mentioned, there is presently no category for (any) American Indian languages; (2) if we wanted to incorporate, for example, Somali or Hausa, which belong to the Afro-Asiatic language family, we'd have to add Afro-Asiatic, but also remove the Semitic category since Semitic is also a branch or subfamily of Afro-Asiatic. (Actually, you could do it in at least two ways:

• List all of Arabic, Hausa, Hebrew and Somali under Afro-Asiatic.
• List Arabic and Hebrew under Semitic (as at present) and Hausa and Somali under "Other Afro-Asiatic" in imitation of the present category "Other Indo-European".)

If we continue in this way, the more languages are incorporated the more complicated this is going to get, and we're going to need to revise (and discuss?) the classification over and over again.

However, near the end of the template (just before "Constructed" languages, which obviously should stand on their own as they now do), we now have the category "East Asian/Polynesian", which has several things "wrong" with it in relation to the preceding categories namely:

• East Asian and Polynesian have nothing to do with each other, so why have they been lumped together?
• None of the languages listed is Polynesian anyway. (The Polynesian languages include Tongan, Samoan, Maori, Tahitian, Hawaiian..., none of which appear there.)
• Some languages listed (as a matter of fact, all of them except Japanese and Korean) are neither East Asian nor Polynesian.

All the above points could be "fixed" by simply correcting the categories without questioning the whole system of classification, but the next problem raises a whole new issue:

• As far as linguistic classifications go, "East Asian" is not a family at all, it is simply a geographical location. So if the classification is by families, you cannot suddenly say "East Asian" without disrupting the classification and making it internally inconsistent.

Before talking about how to solve this, let's take a glance at the main listing of all the language courses. (So far I've been talking about the shorter template that is seen at the top of the page and shows up elsewhere in Wikibooks.)

The Contents box at the top of the page shows how this is structured at present, and it is immediately obvious that it is badly organised, the top-level divisions being:

• General topics
• Constructed
• Indo-European (over 60 books listed, classified into 4 branches plus "Other Indo-European languages", listing 6 further branches covering 9 books)
• Sino-Tibetan (6 items: five Chinese "dialects" plus Nepal-Bhasa)
• Other languages (35 books, divided by language family - 16 top-level divisions plus "Miscellaneous languages", containing three)
• Other language books

This is partly internally consistent, but not altogether (why should Sino-Tibetan have a different status from other non-Indo-European families?). I would also object to Constructed languages being placed before natural human languages rather than at the end of the list. Notice that this system does not mix geographical and "genealogical" categories. Potentially, it could be cleaned up, made more consistent, and mechanisms could be determined to open up new families and branches as needed to accommodate new books (I put Miskito in the Other languages/Miscellaneous languages sub-category simply because there was nowhere else to put it on the existing list).

But, I would ask, do we want to do that? Do we want the bookshelf to be ordered following a strict classification into families (and sub-families)? Is that useful for most users, and does it best serve the bookshelf's main purpose? These questions have already been raised on this page but I think they remain unresolved. Some people feel it is not a useful, practical system, and I tend to agree. One argument in its favour that has been given is that it encourages people to learn about the "etymological" (I quote; the word is used incorrectly here, but we understand the point) relationships between languages and facilitates random browsing. I myself feel there is much to be said in favour of the rejoinder that the principal function of this bookshelf is not to teach people about the relationships between languages - for that there are other sources; try reading Wikipedia, for example; and that as for random browsing, why not let people randomly browse through an alphabetical language list for that matter?

For many practical reasons, which I won't spell out further as I've already gone on for too long (I tend to do that, I apologise), I think there are two options either of which would be more useful to most Wikibooks readers than the present one, and which each have points in their favour (and against, obviously):

• a simple alphabetical listing by language
• a simple, broad geographical listing, e.g. by continent (and alphabetical within each major geographical category)

Perhaps the second of these (by continent) would be good for the smaller template and the first (alphabetical by language) for the main, complete list.

At least with either of these solutions I'd know where to put Miskito! --A R King 07:56, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank-you! I've never been able to formulate this, but I've always had that nagging feeling that (well-meaning) attempts to classify languages into linguistic families are not going to help anybody trying to find a language book. If you're just a guy trying to learn enough Korean for a business trip, you're probably not going to know that it is an Altaic (maybe) language or even care for that matter. I'd say we go with the geographical listings. Continental seems a little large, but anything smaller is probably going to be too arbitrary. -- Kowey 08:33, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Actually, we might be able to use this UN classification -- Kowey 08:37, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Re: Language Shelf Reorganisation

I'm glad that finally things are moving. I found the old classification very correct (going as far as Q-Celtic and so on), but not usable by the average guy on the street. I believe a classification by continent is much preferable, though some people may look for Spanish under 'American'... By the way, I don't really see why we can't list all languages for which there are books that are at least 25% complete in the template, at least for the Languages Bookshelf page (and maybe limit them for the main page, though a lot of subjects have more books listed there).

Unfortunately most of the language books can't actually be used as textbooks for any kind of study, even if they have received the "Book of the Month" award. I mean for example the main German textbook, which is why I started creating the "Bite-sized" method for German. I believe the main problem is a lot of good will paired with zero knowledge of pedagogics. The help page on how to create a good language-teaching Wikibook should be a must read for anybody wanting to create a new book in this shelf. Since that's not going to happen and since I now got a well-paying job creating multimedia lessons, I am no longer actively creating lessons here. I do believe that a wiki could be a good way of having people collaborate to create courses, but only under the condition that they get together at the start and then work as a team (single contributors work well too, as you show, Alan, but it's too frustrating) and that they first discuss the goals, methodology and lesson plan of their course. Otherwise there will be too many cooks in the kitchen and the result will be something like the Chinese Wikibook. I'm currently testing this concept (having a small team develop a course using a wiki) creating a basic English course for people in developing countries.

Junesun 21:49, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

First of all, Junesun, I'd like to let you know that as far as I'm concerned, at least, your work and attempts to improve things here did not go unnoticed. I am a relative newcomer to these parts and it looks like all that happened before I got here. I sympathise with your efforts, agree with your evaluation of the situation, approve of your intentions, and can understand perfectly well your frustration too. I have hopes of continuing to work in the direction you have begun by (a) producing some quality materials that may be useful (at least to some of the more serious potential editors here) as models (the Miskito material represents a first, somewhat experimental step towards that), and (b) in the future, if I can manage it, also writing some instructional materials here teaching the whole process of language textbook production - material that might be of practical use both for future wikibook writers and for writers of such materials in any medium. That's a very ambitious project, and not all ambitions get fulfilled, so I won't shout too loudly about that yet, but I have thought about doing this. Support would be helpful regarding all that, and while I understand you may decide you have better things to do now (and perhaps you're right), if you change your mind or would like to at least discuss these plans, I hope you will do so - your contributions could be most valuable.

Coming to your comments and suggestions on the bookshelf and template:

• some people may look for Spanish under 'American'...

I've inserted a note at the beginning of the "American" section to warn people.

• By the way, I don't really see why we can't list all languages for which there are books that are at least 25% complete in the template...

As in my 1st proposal? We could. I don't have strong feelings on the matter. Perhaps we should go on discussing that point.

• Unfortunately most of the language books can't actually be used as textbooks for any kind of study...

Yes, I noticed. In that sense, this whole list could be seen as a bit of a farse - the titles look very impressive, but when you start to look at the contents, most of it is very disappointing indeed. While that can be seen as a criticism of the list, it is a matter that exceeds the purpose of the present exercise as I understand it, which was to decide how to organise the list. Another matter for future discussion?

• I do believe that a wiki could be a good way of having people collaborate to create courses, but only under the condition that they get together at the start and then work as a team...

And, I would add, have the minimally necessary know-how to do so (which you said too). It comes down to a matter of education, doesn't it: education so that people understand what it takes to create a course, and education for those really interested in making the necessary effort to teach how to do the things that need to be done. I have also worked in this area in the "real world" - by producing language textbooks (including a small-scale collaborative effort which WAS a success); by teaching language teachers to teach (and working as a language teacher myself, of course); by working with teams producing language-teaching-related materials (e.g. learning objectives); and more recently, by working in a third-world country (El Salvador) in a project (designed by me) to support recovery of a dying indigenous language (Pipil or Nawat) in which a team was formed and worked together on the production of language-teaching materials. My experiences reinforce my belief that education is the first stop - people can't do things if they don't know how (or don't even know what they're supposed to be doing, never mind how). Some people aren't really interested in learning and will just plod along blindly for a while, and perhaps it's the best policy just to let them do that. The important thing is to help the other people who do want to improve and learn and produce good work. That good work, when it's done, will speak for itself, as results usually do. I find arguing with people enormously tiring, while working can be tiring at times too, but can be exhilarating too and is ultimately far more productive. Now, how to make that work in the Wikibook environment? Cheers, Alan --A R King 08:24, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Back to the template

Resuming the discussion in progress above: (1) I understand that only certain people have permission to edit the template. So if and when we're ready to modify the template, who does that and how do we go about getting them to do it?

(2) Kowey, please see Junesun's question about whether we really want to only list one book per language in the template, or include all books that are over 25%, and tell me what you think because I'm pretty easy either way. Alan --A R King 08:34, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Re (1): we could always post something on the discussion page of that template and maybe one of the Staff Lounge areas to get an administrator's attention. As for (2), I'm afraid of having the template be too cluttered, but I suppose if we allowed for 25%s and used the disambiguation page method, it would be fine. I tend to see the template as being our first foot forward, so whilst (a) we want to show that we cover a broad range of subjects (b) we also want to highlight the best of our work... Although one thought is that the progress bars tend not to be updated frequently enough to be informative, so maybe we shouldn't rely too much on them anyway. As usual, no real resistance to offer. -- Kowey 11:22, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Re (2): Kowey, when you say "but I suppose if we allowed for 25%s and used the disambiguation page method, it would be fine", are you just suggesting that we stick to my fourth proposal (the most recent one) for the template and do the disambiguation thing, i.e. 25%s but no multiple-books-per-language on the template? I guess so. What I think this means is that the link for (for example) "German" on the template will not lead directly to the book titled "German" (which would in a sense be overriding other German textbooks on the bookshelf which could, for all we know, be even better than that one, or at least different), but rather to some sort of disambiguation page where the German-related textbooks are all listed and the user chooses which one(s) to look at. Extra work, but it may work and would keep the template list less cluttered, as you say. Someone's going to have to created the necessary disambiguation pages and maintain them (as new books emerge, requiring new disambig pages or updating of existing ones), and I don't see much evidence of there being a large, busy, active community here to do those sorts of things (as one gets on Wikipedia); do you think we have the human resources for it? Otherwise, it sounds fine to me.

As for the progress "bars", we do need some sort of index of progress for some such decisions, and I think it should be (and is?) the responsibility of people working on books to keep them updated, and in their interest to do so if they want their work to have the visibility it deserves. But if somebody wanted to look at individual books and evaluate whether they deserve to have a higher progress indication (and so, perhaps, get onto the template list), I guess that would be okay too; but again, who is going to do it? --A R King 11:48, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Right, so I guess we're stuck with the progress bars, then. Anyway, I guess I was advocating example #4 without remembering it. Also, I suspect that creating the disambiguation pages requires a pretty small initial effort (I would make them bookshelves, like this one) will likely be maintained by the respective language book authors. To avoid duplicating effort, we might use the transclusion mechanism to automatically merge the individual subbookshelves into this one. -- Kowey 12:06, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

I've answered a littlie bit higher up on the page, please read my response there. --A R King 07:43, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Language books quality

If I recall correctly, there was a wikibook: page that tried to suggest some best practices for writing language books; however, those practices seem to have the mix of good intentions + poor pedagogy that Junesun was talking about. We might do well to hunt that page down and make it better! -- Kowey 11:22, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I don't think Help:How_To_Build_An_Excellent_Wikibook_Teaching_Any_Language was the culprit. If memory serves me right, the book I had in mind was quite painful (sorry... I am pretty clueless about pedagogy myself, so what do I know?) and all the language books except for Miskito and some others seemed to follow it like a template -- Kowey 11:25, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, I've thought about this before, as apparently a number of us have, and it seems to me that if we can't actually stop people from writing books (or so-called "books", in some cases) of dubious quality and usefulness, then that leaves us with the options of (1) creating other books, hoping that setting an example will eventually have some effect, or (2) offering advice, and hoping that it will at least sometimes be followed. I plan to try doing both at some point. It would be good if there were cooperation between some people on such projects. Such people would effectively self-select themselves (those who are not interested will probably remain uninterested) and my theory as that by being more active, our voice will eventually prevail. That seems to be, grosso modo, what happens on Wikipedia on the whole, don't you think.

Another thing I notice is that (predictably, I guess) there are plenty of moves to start new Wikibooks and much less work done to develop them. As Junesun says, most of the titles are actually pretty much useless as they stand. Not sure what can be done about that though, within the philosophy of Wikibooks. --A R King 11:57, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm writing a kind of "wikibooklet" for an audio course: Spanish by Choice. I have no experience in language teaching; thus, any advice, opinion, or comment that you can give on it is more than welcome! --Martin Kraus (talk) 14:21, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Questionable links added

I see new links have been added to the bookshelf page, linking to LIL Esperanto 1, LIL French 1 and LIL German 1. After having a brief look at the target pages, I have my doubts about whether these are wikibooks at all, in which case as I understand it the links should not have been put here. But perhaps I'm mistaken; would someone else like to have a look and see what you think, please? Would the author of the pages and the new links like to explain here whether or not these are wikibooks? Thanks. No offence intended, but I think we need to be a bit coherent... --A R King 21:35, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I would hope that they are Wikibooks. They are no different to other books on the site (except for being longer than two pages, perhaps). Same GFDL license; same spirit of community authorship. I sincerely hope that someone will one day be able to improve everything I have written. I'm quite aware that if I simply write some lesson plans and wait for everyone to fill them in, I'll still be waiting twenty years from now. After I have presented a completed text, the Wikibooks community can make any changes they please.

You can download the "mainstream" French and German books as PDF files. You will also be able to download my books directly from Wikibooks as PDF files as soon as I have finished making my own corrections to them. (I made the assumption that it would not be acceptable to upload a 300-page rich-text file to Wikibook's servers.)

My VR software doesn't understand PDF or Wikicode, but it is quite comfortable with rich-text. That is why I want to finish making corrections to the text itself before I format the books as polished PDF documents.

I hope that answers your question. --Lutonia 06:34, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Hi Lutonia, I appreciate your commitment to the spirit of community authorship and the GFDL. That said, the purpose of the wikibooks and wikimedia sites is also partly technical, in that it allows people to edit the same document immediately (impulsively!) without any overhead, i.e. downloading the RTF source, learning about version control software (for instance) or about diffing and patching. So unless you are willing to translate your books to wikicode and have them be edited with the (admittedly less than ideal) wiki software, wikibooks is really not the appropriate place for your books. I'm sure the staff lounge would be a fine place to advertise your project and to attract collaborators. But creating links like LIL French 1, which do little than point to a PDF is not wiki-appropriate. Also, I would understand your reluctance to switch to wikicode if you were working with a typesetting language LaTeX, but since you're dealing with RTF anyway, it seems that you won't be losing much by switching to wikicode. How about getting somebody technical to help you make the conversion? We can figure out how to a PDF out of it later; it has been done before many times over -- Kowey 07:14, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Also, in case you were worried about convenience, there are tools which will let you edit the wikibooks content directly from a text editor. There is a piece of software called MVS, which allows you to 'check out' pages from any mediawiki hosted site as if it were a CVS repository (if you're not sure what I'm going on about, it's no big deal). These pages can then be edited in any editor, such as Emacs and 'committed'. -- Kowey 07:17, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

I am very keen to have the books converted into wikicode, and as soon as possible. There are obvious benefits to a course which can be read online, a page at a time, and that contains clickablable hypertext.

However, I cannot make the conversion myself. I cannot use a keyboard and my voice recognition software knows nothing about LaTeX or MVS. I cannot use these editors.

As far as I can see, it makes a lot of sense for me to finish my editing, convert the document into a polished PDF file, upload it to Wikibooks, and then ask for the community's help in converting it to other formats. It would be a waste of time to do the conversion right now, only to have to do another conversion a month later.

While someone is doing the conversion (it's not a five-minute task), it's not such a bad thing to have a completed PDF file available for download, which people can read right away. How many usable books are there on the language bookshelf right now - two? --Lutonia 10:33, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't have the time to formulate a proper response. More later. -- Kowey 11:13, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

The LIL books were deleted after a Vote for Deletion early in 2008. Recent Runes (talk) 20:26, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Where are the Baltic languages - Lithuanian, Latvian?

I've seen full text of Lithuanian in the requested books after I inserted Lithuanian. Why this very old indoeuropean language is not presented in common list?

78.62.22.250 09:28, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Inclusion of languages in the template (the "common list" as you call it) is no reflection of how "important" they are. It was agreed in recent discussion (see a little higher up on this page) to try to include languages that at least have the 25% progress bar. My own position is that all languages are important; this restriction is aimed at providing a manageable list and indicating to users the books that are likely to be most "useful" - simply because those books are minimally developed. Develop the books (or revise the progress bars if they are out of date - this should preferaby be done by books' authors, and taken on good faith) and the books can then be included in the template. I hope that answers your question. --A R King 10:07, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

New book on learning German

There's a new book on the above subject that I think is under 'languages' classification. Could someone figure out where to put it? Laleena 11:48, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Hi Laleena. If you can please tell me where the book you are referring to is or (preferably) the link, I'll see what I can do. --A R King 08:48, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

High quality Public Domain courses online with audio

Some organisation have created a page with PDFs and MP3s of courses from the US Foreign Service Institute. This is high quality material (although it dates from the 60s and 70s). I say this mostly because it's often extensive: lots and lots of MP3s and course books of 150 pages or more. Languages include Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Greek, French, Yoruba and more. The organisation claims that they are public domain (which would make sense, these being govt produced). We should definitely think about raiding these for our respective books. -- Kowey 11:24, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

One of my language-loving friends says that these courses use the same techniques as the much celebrated Pimsleur method (at least for the Cantonese module) -- Kowey 11:29, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

The new URL appears to be http://fsi-language-courses.org. --Martin Kraus (talk) 09:07, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Language example conversations

Is there a guideline or template for conversation examples in the language courses? I don't see many examples of conversations, but I have seen some here: Japanese Mini-tutorial lesson. I have also asked for some opinions on a few ideas I posted on the Talk Page of the Japanese Mini-tutorial lesson. Hope to get some more opinions or maybe even ideas... 真実 - Shinjitsu _{To my Talk page!} 23:08, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Language groupings

Turkish is a European language but Azerbaijani (a dialect of Turkish) is an Asian language? I know for political reasons Turkey is European, but it doesn't make sense linguistically. (In that case Hungarian, Estonian and Finnish would be "Asian" too). Maybe Azerbaijani should be European too, since Azerbaijan is partially in Europe.

Or perhaps we should not divide languages by continent. Maybe doing so by language family (Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, etc) would be less ambiguous. Νεοπτόλεμος ( talk | email | contribs ) 04:12, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

There has been a long discussion about this issue (see above) and the consensus was that a linguistically correct categorization is less useful for typical Wikibook readers, who are usually unaware of the linguistically correct language family they are looking for. Therefore, whenever there is a serious ambiguity, links should be added to point to the correct category. (I added links for Azerbaijani, Afrikaans and Hebrew from European; and for Yiddish from Middle Eastern.) --Martin Kraus (talk) 20:13, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Learning through songs

Learning through songs is valuable, so I thought I'd mention that some songs on Youtube have the lyrics in subtitles, e.g. the Indonesian pop song Jadikan aku yang kedua.

On the one hand, I've read that it's harder to absorb information when it's in both spoken and written form (this was talking about Powerpoint presentations with text). On the other hand, it probably helps in language learning where the sound alone is not enough to pick up the words - and where the focus is less on the understanding the specific content, and more on making the connection between the sounds and the words.

If we want to promote the use of this method, is it acceptable to link videos from the lesson pages? I'm guessing not, as they very likely will have copyright issues. If that is the case, I'll just add the idea to How to Learn a Language. --Chriswaterguy (talk) 20:18, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

My experience with learning from songs is that you always run into copyright issues. Neither can you publish the lyrics nor a translation of the lyrics without a permission by the copyright holders. I'm not sure what can be done about this. --Martin Kraus (talk) 14:09, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Church Latin

After reviewing the section for Latin, I feel that an entirely different section should be allowed to be created for Latin in the form that is in current use within the Catholic Church. This is not to diminish the good work that has been done for the study of Republic Latin, but let us say the truth, it is not what is used or taught by Catholic clerics. This is not to say that people should not study the classics by any means, just to point out that someone wishing to study the form of Latin used in Vatican Documents, and in Catholic rituals would be better served by a different section with a different scope.

It is still the same language to be sure, but there are lots of issues of Idiom and Vocabulary that would be very different. Certainly you can understand what feelings of repression someone may feel if they are forced to learn Catholic Latin before they may move on to Caesar. In the same way, many Catholics feels a sense of being misunderstood when we have to study Caesar first and read about pagan gods before we get to what we think is the good stuff, like the vulgate and the breviary.

Also, the end goal is different. In Classical studies, students are taught to decode the sentence (translate) and understand the final English result. The focus is on translation, changing the Latin into English. For some Catholics, that may be the case but many Catholics do not want to translate, they want to learn the various prayers, passages from the Bible, hymns, and Papal quoted in the original Latin and keep it in the Latin and understand it in the Latin.

I would be more than happy to get to doing much of the work myself, and indeed it would not be that much work. I am simply asking for you to allow the pages to be created and to be here and not to go behind taking out the "j"s or turning the "u"s back into "v"s.

Hello there and welcome to the languages bookshelf! First of all: please sign your comments with --~~~~. Even if you have no username, this will at least show the time when you wrote a comment. Second: Just go ahead and start a new wikibook. You'll find more information about how to start a new book here: Help:Starting_a_new_page_or_book. The most important issue is probably the name. Since "Latin" is already the title of the wikibook about Republic Latin, you should choose something different such as "Church Latin". (It's more difficult to change the name of the book "Latin", but I think you really shouldn't worry about that.) As you will see there are really not a lot of people working on language books right now. If someone takes out "j"s and turn "u"s to "v"s, just undo the changes and discuss the issue with the user. I'm sure everyone will understand and won't bother you again. And really: this is a very peaceful place. Welcome! :) --Martin Kraus (talk) 10:00, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I have started the book under the title Ecclesiastical Latin and will work on it from there. Thank you for your help. 219.127.251.137 (talk) 01:19, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Great, I've added the book to the bookshelf. It is certainly OK if you want to proceed without a user name; however, I would recommend that you create a user account just to make it possible to attribute your contributions to a specific user. Imagine this scenario: you finish this book anonymously. One year later another user comes along and decides to rewrite the book in a totally inacceptable manner. If you then want to discuss these changes, you will have a much stronger position if you can be identified as the original author of the book. I think it is always in the interest of books and their readers that the main contributions can be attributed to specific users. In any case: Happy writing! --Martin Kraus (talk) 09:55, 25 November 2008 (UTC)