Talk:Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks

Programming languages
Does this include programming languages? ;)
 * Well, I suppose most of it could work out that way, but I'm not sure if repetition is the best way to teach someone how to do a while loop :\ --Mijokijo 12:35, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

Mentioning exceptions
When there are exceptions for cases, they should be mentioned. Bad habits ensue from ignoring exceptions and it is more difficult to rectify habits than it is to prevent them. If you are unwilling to teach it, at least explain succinctly.

The two worst mistakes of teaching a language (in order of magnitude) are merely stating sentences with translations and being linguistic in explanation.

Using splash screens is akin to using leetspeek. The lack of its usage doesn't raise the intelligence and its usage affirms the underlying's suck.

However, these are merely my opinions.


 * Please feel free to modify the book with those and other additions to the guidelines. --Mijokijo 02:07, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

IPA and etymology
I had an excellent Spanish instructor for a semester of college. Along with teaching the musical-rhythm (similar to the sound of a Jack-in-the-Box) she explained the physical motions of producing vowels and the etymology of the vocabulary. Additionally, IPA representations are helpful to the literate.

Splash/Intro Screen
Now, I personally dislike Splash/Intro screens, but I don't think they really say anything about the wikibook per se. For instance, both the French and German wikibooks use splash screens, but I wouldn't say that they are bad wikibooks; they are probably some of the better wikibooks in their genre, but the splash screens need to go :P --Mijokijo 00:32, 22 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't understand your reasoning. Flash screens don't make a book better but they do make it look better and we must remember that this kind of thing is more important for Internet media than traditional print media.  Would you prefer to read something which is just lines of unformatted text or read the same thing enhanced by a few relevent pictures? Xania [[Image:Flag_of_Italy.svg|15px]]talk 21:15, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Templates
The template I uploaded lastnight is pretty half-baked. I'll improve it later today, but at least it gives an idea of what I have in mind for a good looking curriculum. When I was working on it I also got the idea of prominent contributor recognition, which I'll add to the guidelines. --Mijokijo 13:30, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Move to Help namespace
This page, although useful in trying to set out some guidelines, is not a textbook itself and really shouldn't be in the main namespace. It does seem suitable for the Help namespace, and so I'm moving it there, Jguk 14:21, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

"Mental picture" dictionaries
In a book "How to Learn Any Language," by Barry Farber, there was a chapter about making up little stories to remember vocabulary. For the Russian Wikibook I made a ]]Russian/Lesson 4|mental picture dictionary]. For example, the Russian word for "house" is Дом, or "dom." The "mental picture" is "You know how Russian churches have onion domes? Russian houses have the same domes." You visualize all Russian houses with onion domes.

Another example that any "Clockwork Orange" fan will remember is that "good" in Russian sounds like "horror show," so Alex and his "droogs" (Russian for "friends") say "Horror show!" when they like something.

On the Talk page, someone was shocked&#151;SHOCKED!&#151;at the nonsense I'd written. My Russian professor also discouraged us from using "mental pictures," although she said it's OK when you first learn a word.

On the other hand, both of my Russian tutors loved it. They had a lot of laughs at the strange things I'd tell them that "all" Russians" did, e.g., stealing tables, putting chairs in their attics, never taking off their shirts outside so they'd have white bellies, etc. :-)

I realize that this may be a radical idea to some, but I'd be happy to add a section about this to "How To Build An Excellent Wikibook Teaching Any Language." No textbooks have "mental picture" dictionaries. If Wikibooks offered "mental picture dictionaries" they would be better than other textbooks. Plus this is something readers could easily contribute, as they learn vocabulary or make a funny connection to an English word or phrase.--Thomas David Kehoe 18:28, 18 June 2006 (UTC)


 * This idea has been proven to work well for some words but can't be applied to all. Also it's very important to just use it as a hint to remind yourself, not as a definite guide to the pronunciation.


 * The Bite-sized language lessons for German encourage users to contribute such mnemonics for vocabulary and grammar within the lessons themselves. Junesun 09:15, 19 June 2006 (UTC)


 * People will never agree about what methods are best and all the suggestions on here are just ideas and not foolproof methods. As for learning the Russian or Polish word 'dom' I'd have thought that thinking of 'domestic' would be the easiest way to remember the word? Xania [[Image:Flag_of_Italy.svg|15px]]talk 21:11, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Learning a language Section1.16.1
Not everybody learns a language the same way. In fact, research has shown that learning how to construct a sentence and conjugate verbs can prove frustrating and some people learn better when they are given second language video or audio material, in context. They see and hear how the language is used as it's used. Though I didn't know how to construct sentences, memorizing dialogs in my earliest language classes helped me learn vocabulary words and memorize a sentence structure I could use in the future.

Move back to main name-space
I believe the topic has far too much nuance than can be covered on a single help page and deserves to be a book in its own right. I propose that we move this back to the main name-space. --Swift (talk) 02:56, 1 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I totally agree and moved it. --Martin Kraus (talk) 12:01, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Books trying to be curriculums ?
The section on 1-2-3-4-5 Punch contains the remarks:
 * Many wikibooks for languages are trying to be curriculums rather than textbooks or references. This is an excellent goal, but to achieve it you must plan your curriculum, and repetition is key to any curriculum.

I know some time has passed since this was written, but does anyone understand what the author was driving at exactly? Is he / she drawing attention to idiosyncratic content with the idea that departing from established standards is a risky approach? Or is it something else? Recent Runes (talk) 20:18, 21 July 2010 (UTC)


 * The way I understood this sentence was that many language wikibooks (and language courses in general) just take the whole content they want to present and split it up into lessons, such that each lesson covers a part of the whole content (e.g. a particular grammar topic or a particular communication situation like shopping). And this is very much what a curriculum does: you decide what to teach and then split it up and order it in some way. There are several reasons why this approach doesn't work very well for language books (depending on the kind of topics you choose) but the main reason it cannot work is that presenting any language topic just once and then not reviewing it systematically will almost always fail to teach the topic to the reader. Without systematic review, most people cannot learn anything. Thus, the content of the lessons has to overlap, the very same topics have to be reviewed in multiple lessons, over and over again. For a curriculum it is fine to take the whole content, split it up and order it in some way. For a language textbook, this approach cannot work. At least that's my understanding of this sentence. --Martin Kraus (talk) 18:08, 22 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, that is a problem with many of the books still. So we can say those books are like curriculums in their present states of development. I expect this happened unintentionally, rather than being a conscious objective from the start. Perhaps they need a big table or spreadsheet showing how the grammar etc is allocated to the lessons. It sounds like a good deal of work would be needed though! Recent Runes (talk) 19:55, 22 July 2010 (UTC)