Wiktionary talk:Phrasebook

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[edit] Phrase book

Hi fellow wiktionarians.

What do you think about starting a phrase book section? The idea occurred to me since a Spanish speaker asked me to help her to learn English. She was thinking about doing it by e-mail. But why not do it through Wiktionary? It would be nice that the phrases can also be listened to spoken by a native speaker. For English that would probably mean storing at least two sound files (US and UK), although Australian, Scottish, Irish etc could also be interesting, but not essential.

Would it fit in Wiktionary? I would think it does. Can we upload sound files? I don't think we need to have a separate section or anything. It can simply be among the other entries.

What do you think? I'll try to start by putting some example entries.Polyglot 22:38, 8 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I like the idea and I'm curious what structure will evolve. Actually I would like to see every word used in a "sample phrase" in text at first, but it would also be fun to listen to it. Henryk911 20:32, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I like the idea as well, but I wonder who is going to record the sound files? Webkid 08:39, 23 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Everybody who feels like doing the effort and who can connect a microphone to his/her computer. Uploading them is not hard. It's the same procedure as for uploading image files. There is an explanation of how to link to them once they are uploaded. Let your voice be heard! :-) Polyglot 11:21, 23 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Wikibooks already has quite a few language textbooks - see Wikibooks:Languages bookshelf for a list. However I think a dictionary is also a good learning tool (I like browsing my dictionary rather than attending class). That's the idea behind Meta:Wiki Language School and Learners Wictionary. See also Wiktionary:Phrase book. Flammifer 22:06, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm interested also. I was about to start a similar project :) My idea was to create a database of the most common/useful words or expressions in any language and combine text, images/animations and audio to help the learning process. My idea is that the more images or audio samples for a given word we have, the better.

There's many reasons for this:

• Compare accents.
• Sometimes you encounter a sound you don't have in your own language, and it's good to know how different people pronounce it, as it helps see the possible variations and teachs the learner that there's no such thing as a "perfect pronunciation". eg. the way german or swiss pronounce "ich bin".

What I also wanted is use this (I hope vast) collection of information to build my own language courses, games, etc, as I want to do my own research about the most effective ways to teach/learn a language. Multilang 08:54, 05 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, this would be a great idea, but do you propose simply putting the sound files on the already existing pages or in a seperate "Phrasebook" section?--Bakutaro 14:50, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Hold on people. While a phrasebook is a useful thing, that doesn't mean Wiktionary is the place for it. In fact it's pretty much specifically excluded in the Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion. What this amounts to is including a bunch of phrases that aren't worthy of inclusion as entries of their own under the reasoning they are useful in a phrase book. And it makes them look like any other word entry, which is not good in my opinion. Wikibooks is the better place for this I think. - Taxman 15:40, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Hi, I'd like to mention Occleve - the Open Content Learning Environment here, which is both a language learning system and a phrasebook, includes sound clips... and has a custom front end which runs on your mobile phone, so you can learn on the move. It downloads the tests directly from its wiki. So I think it's fair to say it does quite a lot of what was being discussed above. However, it uses XML not wikitext. So far it just contains English-Chinese tests, however I'm hoping that will change! --Joe Gittings 12:33, 28 May 2007 (UTC)