GerardM wrote:
Hoi,
From Ray's response it is clear that I must have expressed myself
poorly. I have the feeling that he does not get what I tried to say..
So let me try again.
On 2/20/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
GerardM wrote:
The material was created at
http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Farsi. It was in
the days when everything was still there. The original material had
one basic flaw; it was written left to right while Farsi is written
from left to right. While working on this material, it struck me that
it is really sad that you have to create teaching
material that is as
basic as this for every language.
I don't see anything sad about it at all. It seems perfectly normal
that newbies to Farsi or any other subject would begin at this very
basic level.
It is indeed perfectly normal that people new to Farsi need to learn
their characters, need to learn the sounds of the language, need to
learn to read from right to left. What is sad is that we have to work
hard to create such material for all languages.. remember there are
over 10.000 languages out there.
Why should hard work be so sad? I agree that 10,000 languages implies
100,000,000 language pairs, but most of those pairs are highly
unrealistic. Once the fundamentals of a language have been grasped only
then can you go on to extensive vocabulary building. Lessons need to
explain the most elementary concepts like why an English adjective
usually precedes the noun while a French one normally comes after.
Hard work should not be circumvented by the belief that there is some
software magic pill that will do it all for you.
As we were creating the concepts for what was called
"Ultimate
Wiktionary" but what is currently known as WiktionaryZ, it came to me
that we should not have the Dutch words there as the translation for
the Farsi content, but that we should have the translation of the
Farsi words in the language of the student. This would mean that
everybody can use the material.
This is not a Wiktionary issue; it is a grammar issue. It is about
deciding where the to put the line between vocabulary and how it is put
together to form a language. These lessons should be in the Wikibook
for the student's own language, where the particularities of the target
language will be explained in a way that he understands. As long as a
lesson is a mere word list nobody will be able to learn from it.
What I discuss is the idea to have what is called for WiktionaryZ a
"DefinedMeaning"; a word is associated with a particular definition.
This combination of a word in a language and its defintion is
translated in as many languages as possible. When the word in Farsi is
partnered with a reference to a DefinedMeaning, we can based on things
like the language settings of the user show a word like "mother" in
the user's language for me it would be "moeder" wiht مادَر.
When you look at the Farsi lessons; you might have noticed that in
every lesson a few more sounds and characters are introduced. That is
the objective of these lessons.
Yes, I looked at the first "lesson", and I did see the first four lines
as referring to four letters of the Farsi alphabet. Tying this to
Wiktionary2 doesn't help anybody. Word lists are not lessons.
Languages are learned in a meningful context, not by having students
memorize a random list of translated words. There are many elementary
concepts in the syntax of a language that absolutely need to be
explained from the beginning. When the language has a different script
many language teachers believe that introducing the script at the very
beginning is not important, but that the student should learn the
fundamental structures of the spoken language first. That can be done
with romanized script.
It is the spoken not the written form that contains the fundamentals of
the language.
Today I was asked by someone where the Farsi lessons
were, somebody
actually wants to use it.. This means that all this effort had people
use it... It meant that all the pronunciations were going to be
listened to... The material is not there anymore .. it is not useful
anymore ..
The material is still there but most of the pages appear to have been
orphaned. See [[Talk:Farsi]] for links when someone was asking about
what to do with the orphaned pages. It was User 83.116.146.232
who copied all this material to the fa:wikibooks, and re-linked to it to
create all the orphans. His effort was incomplete as he did not do this
with the later lessons. He has not been seen since March of last year.
The material in the Farsi wikibooks is there because that is the way
to get right to left orientation for these lessons. They are called
from the [[wikibooks:Farsi]] page. They are therefore not orphaned
even though your wiki experience might suggest it is.
I did not say that the pages on the fa:Wikibooks were orphaned, but that
your original on the en:Wikibooks were orphaned when User:83.116.146.232
copied them into the fa:Wikibooks, and changed the links from the Table
of Contents. Those original pages are still there on en::Wikibooks.
The timing could have been worse; Brion is busy with
the integration
of the namespace manager. It is therefore possible to have pages in
the fa.wikibooks that are specific for the Dutch language and pages
specific for the English language. Alternatively we could have a
namespace for Farsi content in the nl.wikibooks. This would mean
however that we should be able to have a namespace that is oriented in
a different direction from the other namespaces in a database. I do
not know if we can do this already, I am sure however that we will
want something like this for the right to left languages like Farsi in
WiktionaryZ.
The lesson pages should likely have a mixed orientation, but primarily
in the orientation of the student's own language since that is where the
instructions will go.
Now there is one practical question remaining;
what will we do with
the Farsi lessons in the fa.wikibooks that were originally intended to
teach Dutch people Farsi.
Assuming that the situation in nl:wikibooks is similar to the English
one, the situation should be explained to the fa:community. They then
should feel free to delete them based on their own rules.
Last time I read some Dutch, it was indeed left to right. :)
Nobody was saying that Dutch and English had different orientations.
Only that Dutch and English speakers will face very similar problems
when trying to learn Farsi.