User talk:Aphoneyclimber

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Welcome to Wikibooks, Aphoneyclimber!
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Hi Aphoneyclimber,

I notice you are working on the Modern Greek book. I am doing Dutch -my native tongue- and have been pondering on how to make things more interactive and engaging. I think a lot of that is pertinent to whatever the language is you are working at, but we don't seem to have a community of language book writers where we exchange our tricks/ideas/philosophies, so we are all reinventing a (square?) wheel on our own.

noicon
naast

Just to give you an example of what I mean. I was working on prepositions and prepositional adverbs yesterday and created a bunch of simple icons to demonstrate the meaning of each prep visually. I also added a button for the pronunciation, thanks to the Dutch wiktionary we now have sound files for just about any Dutch word, but the icon idea is new as far as I can tell. I wonder what you make of it. It could easily be adapted for other languages. Just import in Inkscape and change the one text item into δίπλα I think it is. Actually you can even do that in a text editor like notepad. Use find to locate the word 'naast', copy and paste δίπλα into it and save under a different name like el-icon-δίπλα.svg. Then upload to commons.

What I really would like is to have a user group for language book authors or maybe a portal where we could share this kind of tricks. Jcwf (discusscontribs) 13:03, 16 May 2015 (UTC)Reply

P.S.

OK, so I gave myself an idea and decided to carry it out to see how hard it was. It actually took three minutes:

  1. I opened my svg in notepad
  2. I used ctrl+f to find the word naast
  3. I replaced it by δίπλα
  4. I save the file as el-icon-δίπλα.svg, which was a little tricky: you need to select "all files" otherwise it becomes a .txt file. Also you need to open another box and opt for unicode. Because it contains Greek I guess
  5. Then I uploaded to commons. I just dumped the file under the category Greek language for lack of better.

Jcwf (discusscontribs) 13:34, 16 May 2015 (UTC)Reply

icon for the Greek word δίπλα, adaptation of nl-icon-naast.svg took me 3 minutes
Thanks for your reaction. I have no idea how that works here, but I did find that we have a Authoring_Foreign_Language_Textbooks page here that contained some useful stuff although little about Useful tricks, so I went ahead and wrote that ;-). We could use its talk page as discussion point I suppose. I also posted something in the Community Portal, but no reaction so far.

Jcwf (discusscontribs) 17:21, 24 May 2015 (UTC)Reply

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