[Wikipedia-l] Foreign language articles

[Merritt L. Perkins]

. There are many things about Wikipedia that I do not know about because
I don't know how to find out or where to look. Richard Gtreves has told
how to find out about 
Wikipedias in different languages. I was surprised that so much has been
written in languages other than English.
. There are many expressions and abbreviation that I do not understand
and don't know where to find an explanation of them.
. Why should speakers of English be interested in encyclopedias in other
languages? 
If you are studying another language and have learned what you can from
language lessons you need some way to practice what you have learned.
Encyclopedias give you a variety of subjects to choose from and
preferably are original articles and not translations.. 
Years ago I tape-recorded the language lessons from shortwave radio
broadcasts from radio Beijing. They sent me the printed books to go with
the lessons.. I have a Chinese English dictionary sent to me from China.
How could I get the articles from the Chinese encyclopedia so that I can
view them on the screen? I would like to have it read the text with a
synthetic voice so that I could listen to it and have it point to words
that it is reading . Is this asking too much? I would like to be able to
print it out on paper. 
Long ago Chinese was written on strips of bamboo, the characters were
written one line vertically downward. A hole new the top allowed a string
to be used to tie them together. When writing on silk or paper they
started in the upper right corner and wrote down. In 1956. the mainland
government adopted simplified characters writing from left to right.. 
I have two writing brushes but no ink stick. Today they use a ball-point
pens.
How could I get the hardware and software needed to write languages other
than English with a computer.?
I am dictating this with Dragon’s NaturallySpeaking 7 preferred. It is
available in the five English dialects: US English, UK English,
Australian English, Indian English, and Southeast Asian English. It is
supposed to be able to read back what you said, and what it recorded on
the screen. For some reason I can't get these features t to work. 
I suggest that when writing an article you should keep in mind that some
of the readers may be learning the language and so explain some of the
terms used. When an abbreviation is used the first time explain what it
stands for in parentheses and perhaps add a footnote explaining what it
means and a reference to an article on the subject...
Merritt L. Perkins