Discussion on talk page of bookshelf

For several years the main place to discuss language books has been the Wikibooks_talk:Languages_bookshelf. However, since the bookshelves are phased out, we might consider to close that discussion and continue here? --Martin Kraus (talk) 09:45, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Agreed Italienmoose (talk) 12:27, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Standards and Problems

I have to admit that I'm very skeptical about the idea of standardizing language learning books. There has been quite some discussion on this on the Wikibooks_talk:Languages_bookshelf but I think these are good ideas and suggestions, but nothing more, not even guidelines.

For example, I have worked a lot on the German wikibook about Spanish, which is a grammar book instead of a language course. Nonetheless, it is one of the most successful German wikibooks. I also worked on the English wikibook Spanish_by_Choice, which is far from a language course, but which is rather popular in the form of PDFs distributed via a podcast.

In my opinion, instead of focusing on a standard for language learning books, we should focus on the real problems: How to get authentic, interesting content? How to get audio files? How to implement exercises? There are many difficult challenges when writing a language learning book on wikibooks; establishing a standard is not part of it.

--Martin Kraus (talk) 09:45, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm trying to take ideas that most of the wikibooks I've seen have attempted to do already. For those guidelines I'm referring to the general language course style books, rather than grammar books or those teaching more specific topics. I don't want to make drastic changes to anything, I want to make a sort of 'aim' for any new wikibooks to make it easier to get them written, and to create a clear direction for those being improved, as many of the original contributors are no longer around. It seems to me as if the books are mostly going to be edited by newcomers now, and because they can't start books from scratch with their own ideas (because they've already been half-written for years), wikibooks are more attractive if it looks like there's an active community for their topic and they have a clear idea of what improvements they should be making. So rather than a standard, I see it more as a goal for newcomers who are daunted by the task of a half-written book in someone else's style.

--Italienmoose (talk) 12:23, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Well, one 'aim' would be to have more recordings by native speakers. And a cleaner layout. I think I should shut up and start working on the German wikibook. :) --Martin Kraus (talk) 19:40, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Complete standardization of such a widely varied topic is sure to be damn near impossible. Structures in some languages are more complex than in others, and structures commonly used in one language may be rare in another. It makes more sense in Esperanto, for example, to introduce past and future tenses of verbs before basic prepositions, which is not true in most languages. Providing sections with phrases and vocabulary relating to travelling (getting a taxi, asking directions, etc.) make perfect sense in languages like Spanish, French and Japanese, but make no sense in Esperanto (where in the world are you ever going to find a use for hiring a taxi in Esperanto?). Providing sections with phrases and vocabulary relating to asking people how they feel and how they are doing make sense in Spanish, French and Esperanto, but due to the nature of Japanese culture they avoid such probing questions more often than not. And so on and so forth. I agree with Mr. Kraus: ideas and suggestions, but nothing more - not even guidelines.

However, there are other ways you can promote standardization across language books that will be useful to both writers and readers. For example, it may be a good idea to create a set of standard language markup templates. In the Esperanto book I use {{lang eo}}. All it does is mark up whatever you supply in span tags that tell the browser what language the enclosed text is (eo is Esperanto), which may assist in font selection for display, and optionally adds some formatting to visually mark the word as non-English (italics). (It could also add whatever page it is used on to a category of pages that use that language, allowing experts to review whether the language is used correctly. There are a number of other possibilities for this trick.)

What I have been thinking of doing is creating a base "language markup" template (possibly {{lang}}) that is a standard base for all other language mark up templates - so that {{lang eo}} could be defined as simply as {{lang|eo}} (with all parameters being passed through: {{lang eo|style=whatever}} would be {{lang|eo|style=whatever}}). All other language books can then either use {{lang}} directly (as in: {{lang|fr}} for French), or, better yet, derive their own template based on it (as in: {{lang fr}} which in turn calls {{lang|fr}}).

If we do this, then, by default, all language books (that use such templates) could have a consistent look-and-feel whenever they display text in the other language (for example, the text could be italicized, unless specifically set not to), yet, if necessary, specific languages could override the default look-and-feel if they need to. It's not quite "standardization", but it helps authors (by providing them an easy and consistent way to mark up foreign languages, and at the same time giving notice to experts that the language was used and thus might need to be checked) and it helps readers (by providing them with a consistent look-and-feel when foreign language phrases or words are used, and by giving their browser a clue how to render the text better).

Following on this logic, other templates could be created to mark up things like other-language-to-English translations in a consistent and pseudo-standardized way: {{translation eo|libro|book}} could expand to libro ("book") and {{translation ja|本|book}} could expand to 本 (hon, "book"), both by way of a common {{translation}} template. --Indiana (talk) 13:11, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

I goofed on the template display code for that Japanese example. It should be {{translation ja|本|book|translit=hon}}. I am going to be bold and create the templates, so that I can demonstrate with working examples. --Indiana (talk) 16:10, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

Alright, this is how the basic {{lang}} template works, with {{lang|es|¡Hola!}}: ¡Hola!

This is the {{lang fr}} template, which is based on {{lang}}, with {{lang fr|Salut!|style=color:green}}: Template:Lang fr

And this is how to turn off italicizing, with {{lang|de|Hallo!|style=font-style:normal}}: Hallo!

All are marked up in the (X)HTML properly as the language they are supposed to be. --Indiana (talk) 16:42, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

Good idea; I'll add this to {{French/Inline word}} and possibly to {{French/Translations table}} instances via JavaScript. --hagindaz 17:17, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

{{French/Translations table}} is another example of a useful language template that can be "standardized" - eventually (I'm not ready for it yet) I'll want something similar for the Esperanto wikibook, at which point I'll probably use {{French/Translations table}} as a base. --Indiana (talk) 12:55, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Sources

Would it be useful to draw up a common list of reliable sources for each language? (including printed and online resources.) Books sometimes reference Wikipedia but I see that some articles have been tagged as lacking sufficient sources e.g. Wikipedia:French_articles_and_determiners. I also find forums like about.com and Wordreference.com very useful, but can they be used as sources? Recent Runes (talk) 11:14, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

I use about.com a lot. For vocabulary I mostly use wiktionary because I deem it more useful that non-collaborative dictionaries. Grammar should be lying around in dictionary appendices. But I think a list of online sources at least would be good. Italienmoose (talk) 12:14, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

I suppose the advantage of Wikipedia is that we are free to copy the material with suitable attributions. It just becomes a problem if it is deleted over there. Printed reference books have the advantage of stability over time, so I would say that they should be used in preference to online resources when naming sources for particular points of language. I have just bought "A Comprehensive French Grammar" by Glanville Price which I think is the kind of authoritative text that all contributors should have to hand. Recent Runes (talk) 16:43, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

A resource with content useful to all language books would make sense, but information regarding specific languages might be more useful on a contributor's guide for that book. --Swift (talk) 12:56, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Terminology

I think the grammatical terminology in many references (including Wikipedia) is over-technical for direct use in our textbooks. Would it be useful to draw up a table mapping grammatical terminology onto plainer English phrases, which would be less offputting for the readers? Recent Runes (talk) 11:14, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm not a native English speaker; thus, I'm very interested in this. I once wrote an introduction to Spanish grammar: Spanish_by_Choice/SpanishPod_grammar. What do you think of its terminology? --Martin Kraus (talk) 19:43, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Assuming that your target audience is the same as for the podcasts (people with credit cards), then I think your terminology is fine. Though perhaps "denote" sounds a bit mathematical, and you could use "are used for" or "indicate" instead. One GCSE school text book I have seen, goes to great pains to avoid technical terminology, even avoiding terms like "gender", "person", "number" and "conjugation"! You probably don't need to go that far for your audience, and if you have followed the style of the podcasts themselves then everything can be justified with reference to those. For material aimed at a younger audience, a bit of "dumbing-down" might be appropriate. Recent Runes (talk) 22:58, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Do you think that it makes sense to avoid terms like "gender", "person", "number" and "conjugation"? After all, it doesn't hurt to learn the most basic grammar terms, does it? And no, the audience is not limited to people with credit cards (the only reason I am linking to a commercial web site is that the Creative Commons Attribution license requires me to do so). --Martin Kraus (talk) 01:06, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Which terms to use depends on the target audience for each book, and conversely the terms used contribute to defining the target audience. I am just suggesting that we could label different grammatical terms as say "low", "medium" or "high" difficulty and authors here could choose whatever level they thought was suitable for their book. Then if people were using source references with a more academic style than the style chosen for their book, they could easily map the terminology onto the appropriate level. Recent Runes (talk) 18:34, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

I doubt that would be productive. Decide whether the use of that term is useful and if so, then add a description to the language book directly, or improve Wikipedia if you reference it. If it can't be explained in-line, simpler terms won't cut it and a proper article with a detailed description and examples will be needed. There is a reason why we have the terminology.

That said, this is a volunteer project. If you want to start such a reference, by all means do. Just realise the immense task and the small number of contributors. I'd encourage you to fix what we have rather than start another unfinished palace... --Swift (talk) 14:17, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Suggestions

Right off the bat, I'm sorry if creating this is a faux pas. I'm relatively new to the workings of Wiki sites, and I'm not familiar with the rules. If everything's alright, I'll start. Other than the numerical ratings we're allowed to give, I haven't seen any areas where learners have given feedback on the content available at Wikibooks. There's no way to bring attention to the areas that need it. Provided that it's not some cardinal sin of Wikimedia, I'd like to start one so that those able to write may better know what to write.

Most sections of the Ukrainian book are heavier on examples than they are on rules. There are no guides to masculine/feminine, singular/plural, infinitive/past/present/future/command, and so on, and I find myself having to work with the (usually unclear) lessons I get from a Google search. If somebody familiar with the language could add more rules and exceptions to the book, especially the Ukrainian Words chapter, that would be much appreciated. Ismailzali (talk) 15:12, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikibooks and the world of wikis. There are few rules but the best place to provide feedback is on the discussion page for the module (i.e. page) you're commenting on, or the main book talk page, should there be one. That said, most of the Wikibooks language books are dormant and lacking contributors. --Swift (talk) 23:37, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

A WikiProject Linguistics?

Would anybody be interested in starting one? --Quintucket (discuss • contribs) 22:05, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

IPA Wikibook

What about a wikibook about IPA? Galzigler (discuss • contribs) 16:45, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Bengali Common Phrases on Wikibooks

It seems to me that the second column is actually the phonetic transcription of the Bengali phrase, and the fourth column is the transliteration of the Bengali Script. Please verify. 96.253.56.53 (discuss) 22:56, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Gothic course book

I 'm currently working on the book to learn Gothic, there was almost nothing, only pronunciation, and the old book looked a bit chaotic to me and wasn't very different from the Gothic declension page at Wikipedia. I try to explain everything and add tips for learning the grammar. I just wanted to mention it here so that you guys know that there will actually be a completed, I hope decent, course to learn Gothic here at Wikibooks in the future. Bokareis (discuss • contribs) 23:39, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Becoming a Linguistic Mastermind/The courses

The German version of this wikibook de:Der einfache Weg zum Sprachgenie was deleted, see logfile. Therefore, the links in the courses page must be removed. I'm not sure what to do:

• mark by <nowiki>
• change the items into something like "not available"
• delete the whole table line
• delete the page (since there's one item left only)

Please, check the situation and tell me what to do, or change the page by yourself. Thank you! -- JuethoBot (discuss • contribs) 09:27, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Formatting

Hello all, I'm trying to revive the Modern Greek wikibook. I previously tried in 2014. One thing I'm really struggling with is formatting. I'm trying to make the styles match that of the French wikibook. My borders for example don't work though. See example: Modern_Greek/Lesson_5.2x.

Is there anybody still around that knows about these things? Where is the best place to ask for help.

Is there also a way to try and promote this, there doesn't seem much interest other than myself anymore.

Please delete / remove this comment as appropriate.

Thanks, Aphoneyclimber (discuss • contribs) 19:25, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

@Aphoneyclimber: What's the style from the French wikibook you're trying to imitate? (Maybe I can help figure it out.) --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 20:47, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

@Pi zero: I'm trying to match the formatting of the tables. Example of a "translation table" on the French page here: French/Lessons/To_be (see Vocabulary: Common Places). The example of mine is here: Modern_Greek/Lesson_5.2x. See it prints the "border" information as text, rather than actually formatting the table. I assume a mistake in the css, or the the Template (accessible via: Template:Modern_Greek/Box_style). Possibly a usage error though, I'm inexperienced with wiki writing / html.

@Aphoneyclimber: Btw, when you want to link to a page on the wiki, best to use wiki markup — for example,

[[French/Lessons/To be]] which gives French/Lessons/To be

rather than

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/French/Lessons/To_be which gives https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/French/Lessons/To_be

so the wiki markup is both easier to write and easier to read. Anyway,

I'm not exactly sure which of the French tables you mean to imitate, but perhaps the important thing is that, so it would seem, most if not all tables in the French wikibooks are being displayed differently than in the Modern Greek one. We have Wikibooks set up so that a book can have a css file that applies to all the pages of that book; for the French wikibook, it's MediaWiki:Perbook/French.css; I expect the special way tables look is probably in there; I can decipher css if I have to, but I'm very far from fluent in it. I'm pretty certain that's the starting point for the difference between the books, though. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 01:05, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Thanks. I've been through and fixed the links here too, in case this remains for the future. I agree that it's one of the styles or the CSS. I have copied the CSS directly from the French page, substituting "french" for "modern_greek". Sadly, I don't have the permission to edit that page, I put the text in as a comment and waited for someone to add it. Hence why I lost interest in updating the page, it was I think over 8 months! My only thought is that something could be case-senstive, though I've maintained the same conventions as in the French book. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Aphoneyclimber (discuss • contribs) 10:26, 3 January 2016‎

@Aphoneyclimber: Ah, I see! Okay, hopefully I'm just about up to speed now with the state of the problem. QU provided you with MediaWiki:Perbook/Modern Greek.css as requested (responding belatedly in June, I see, to an editprotected request from back in April :-), and the trouble now is that it's not actually taking effect on the page. Which would seem, off hand, to be somehow the wiki markup failing to invoke the right css classes. Okay, I'll try to take a look later today and see what I can figure out. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:05, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Indeed. The page is protected so I can't edit. I think that I've fixed it now. I had a "description" on the table template page, removing that seems to have resolved the issue. Should we now remove this discussion or is it useful to remain for the future?

• Discussions generally oughtn't be removed (not even from user talk pages); generally they should be archived instead. While we've been chatting, I've been thinking I might set up archiving for this page, maybe with a very long fuse (say, archive after one year and always leave at least two threads unarchived, or some such). --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:18, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Audio files

Many language files are sorely lacking in audio files, often they have none at all, and I don't see any task force or any effort to rectify this. A language is spoken and cannot be learned without accurate audio from native speakers. The two languages I saw recently were Hokkien and Korean, but from memory I think Spanish and Irish had similar problems. This really is the number one issue detracting from the quality of some of these books as the lessons and tutorials are otherwise great, clearly and easily explained in an interesting way. --80.111.159.148 (discuss) 03:26, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

One problem is that the sounds can't be found into commons:Category:Pronunciation and need to be recategorized. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 19:31, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Vocabulary module

I've created a module that lets you easily add floating boxes with arbitrarily-sized vocabulary lists to language lessons. Right now there's an Irish-specific pronunciation field hard-coded into it, but I'm planning to make that user-selectable, and if anyone is interested it'd be easy to adapt for any language.

The template is here: Module:Irish/VocabularyTable and you can see it in action on the (very preliminary) first lesson of the Irish book here: Irish/Unit One/Lesson One

Is there a shared namespace for this sort of thing anywhere on Wikibooks? If we want to have shared resources and formats, it seems like it might be a good idea.

--Chapka (discuss • contribs) 20:06, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

French/Vocabulary dictionary WikiProject

If anyone sees this in the far future (as I see not many look at discussions) please go to French/Vocabulary ans expand this dictionary as much as possible. Theweathernerd (discuss • contribs) 18:23, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

Aramaic alphabets/Writing systems

If anyone sees this , Could you please visit the Aramaic Alphabet page and expand as much as you can? The page is Very barebones and there is not much useful information on there. Apologies If I sound informal, As I am new to Wikibooks.

Ali Belgrave (discuss • contribs) 14:53, 18 March 2025 (UTC)