User talk:Everlong

Wikibreak Notice - OK, so I've had many unannounced wikibreaks for school, travel and other business, but this time it's hardcore. I'm moving to Taiwan for a year and have decided to forgo a computer. Not that I won't frequent internet cafes and try remaining active, but this could seriously crimp my contributing. Just email me if you want to talk or spur me back into action. --Everlong 2007.01.24

Chinese textbook

Nice to see your work at Chinese Lesson 1! I am working on that too. i think we need cooperation. first of all, i don't want a simplified and traditional mix-up Chinese textbook: that's too confusing for learners! they should exist separately respectively, what do you think? we can talk more about the overall plan in details later! :) --Yacht 08:44, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your response! I though you are a Chinese at first! so don't worry about your final, you will do it will! ;) my aim is to make this textbook best among the language books here, easy to understand, and funny to learn. we need to figure out some way as how will it be easy for a basic? a middle level learner and a high level learner? i am not majoring in Chinese, so i will just do the basic level. do you have any ideas as what is needed to be taught at that level? Here is my little plan:

1. we can organize every 3-4 lessons into a "Unit", talking about one topic;
2. make this book systemically, which means the characters in the book should be consistent; (like Wang Ming is a student in the first lesson, and he will not be a police in the next lesson :) )

okay, the units:

1. Unit 1: simple statement sentences, like "what's this/that?", "this/that is...", "i/you/she/he am/are/is ..."
2. Unit 2: introduce yourself. like "i am a student, i am studying in Peking University", "i am 20", "there are 3 persons in my family"
3. Unit 3: numbers and mesure words, time and date.

...

tell me what you think of that draft. --Yacht

okay, i just joined the group, so that we can plan our textbook in details later. i know how exhausted it would be by a large vocabulary learning a foreign language, that's what i am facing when learning my English. you may take a look at Chinese Lesson 7, which i follow the pattern of my Japanese textbook. there are some "Additional Vocabulary" (marked by *) and new words (marked by **). I guess from the 2nd text on, we can add a "review" at the first first beginning. --Yacht 18:51, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

---

Hi Everlong,

Thanks for the extensive work you've done on the Chinese Wikibooks. One quick thing though: instead of using:

ăĕĭŏŭ

Can you use instead:

ǎěǐǒǔ

Thanks. ;) -- Ran 03:46, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Shamelessly ripped from ktsquare and now Ran (thanks) -- Everlong 07:41, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

1st tone	2nd tone	3rd tone	4th tone	5th tone
ā	á	ǎ	à	a
ē	é	ě	è	e
ī	í	ǐ	ì	i
ō	ó	ǒ	ò	o
ū	ú	ǔ	ù	u
ǖ	ǘ	ǚ	ǜ	ü

Merging

I guess we can merge the lesson 1 and the lesson 8 now. and move the lesson 2-lesson 6 to somewhere else. tough grammar at the very first beginning would only bore people IMO. --Yacht 04:12, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Move lesson 3 to lesson 6 to Chinese Grammar? --Yacht 15:03, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Pinyin table

Hi Everlong, I just saw you made an initial-final combination table some time ago for the Chinese wikibook on Chinese/Pinyin Pronunciation. Coincidentally, I made the same on the english Wikipedia only a few days ago, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin_table . There are some small differences between both tables, especially regarding wether to combine the intials and finals on a logical letter base (q + u = qu, for example )or rather on phonetic base (q + ü = qu). It would be great to come up with a merge of our two tables.

Bye, Abdull ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Abdull )

PDF

The PDF is an excellent job. I have never looked at the book because it demands all sorts of downloads but the PDF just gives it to us straight. RobinH 12:04, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the compliment. It's good to know that the PDF makes the book more accessible. Not as big as some of the other Wikibooks, but the structure and detail make it among the best in Wikibooks in my opinion.

— Everlong 12:51, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Fighting vandalism

I see you reported vandalism, thanks for that. Have you seen Wikibooks:Requests for adminship#Requests for CheckUser rights? CheckUser rights will allow some admins to check IP of vandals using registered accounts. Can you take a look at the vote? --Derbeth ^talk 20:29, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Chinese audio

I've created an account here and I've recorded most of the vocabulary and some of the dialogue, but I haven't uploaded anything yet. When I was recording the second dialouge, I hesitated, since I'm a tad skeptical about the choice of "Amy" for the name of the Chinese person. It would seem a lot more appropriate to choose a commonly used native Chinese name, and not just a Chinese version of an English name. Any thoughts on that one?

Also, I'm not quite sure how to name the dialouge files or whether I should make just one file of the entire dialogue or just one file for each line.

Peter ^Isotalo 16:19, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Peter, thanks for starting on the recording. This will make the book much more accessible to people without a teacher or those unwilling to slog through the pronunciation lessons before jumping into Lesson 1.

About 艾美's name, you have a point. I just wanted to pick something relatively easy to write (which it is, since 美国 is also taught in the lesson) and that looked the same in simplified and traditional if possible. You can swap in another name if you like before recording.

With the file naming, I'd say for the vocabulary, use the pinyin with tone numbers (i.e. Zh-che1.ogg). That way homonyms of the word could use the same file, which would be awkward if you named them using the characters. For the dialogues, they're pretty stable, so I think having the two parts recorded in just two files would be best. Users can always slide back a few seconds in their audio player to rehear a line. In naming them, just make it descriptive, possibly in Chinese because the Chinese of our lessons has been reused in translated versions of the English book (i.e. Zh-中文_第一课_你好！_1.ogg). For the example sentences in the grammar section, I'd say one file per example would be more appropriate, because those are more likely to be switched around or added to. With those I would just name them using the whole sentence in characters so that people know what it means, as homonyms would be unlikely (i.e. Zh-我不是美国人.ogg).

-Everlong 22:16, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, the formula at Commons for individual words is pinyin followed by the number of the tone. If anything, it should be easy to recycle sound files after we have enough of them. Like the multitude of various "shi"-words.

I know there's been trouble in the past with downloading sound files even with really simply non-English characters like "åäö", so I'm worried that this will spell even more trouble for file names with Chinese characters. And I know the HTML-rendition of those characters tend to be horribly complicated. Isn't it better to just call them "Zh-Lesson_1_dialogue_1.ogg" or something like it? Yes, it's English, but it does seem like a reasonable compromise even for the other wikiprojects.

Peter ^Isotalo 16:02, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

OK, I see what you mean with the name corruption. When I try to save a file with Chinese characters in the name they all are replaced by underscores. As long as we put the Chinese and any other translations on the file page, it should be fine to leave the filename in English.

- Everlong 17:32, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for fighting vandalism

I really appreciate your efforts to help combat vandalism on this project. Neither myself nor all of the rest of the administrators can really keep track of all of Wikibooks, and any help to stop this rampant behavior is appreciated. In this case, there is some idiot who is trying to spamlink, but is discovering that it is harder now than it was in the past. And a perception that Wikibooks is a backwater project with nobody paying attention.

I would be cautious however.... you might just end up becoming an administrator here if you keep this behavior of yours up. --Rob Horning 04:24, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Kunst

Maybe the art book would be better named as Introduction to Art and art redirected to the bookshelf? If you don't think that's a good idea, ignore this w/o a response. --Hagindaz 21:35, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Good idea. I hadn't even thought about bookshelves when I started the naming cleanup. With something as general as "Art" a bookshelf is probably best. --Everlong 21:39, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Embassy Page

I've been planning some major work on the Russian wikibook, and was planning on asking some people from the russian wikibooks for some help, and came across the idea of a wikibooks embassy. Apparently, I wasn't the first person with this idea, and you have listed yourself as ambassador on the meta page. I went ahead and made the module English Embassy, which is basically a rough copy of wikipedia's embassy, but was planning on really opening some communication with wikibooks in other languages. I really only speak russian and spanish, though, so maybe you could help me out with this? I was thinking the first good thing to do would be to make a list of en.wikibooks users who can communicate with other wikibookians in their native tongue. Let me know what you think, DettoAltrimenti 14:56, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Hi

to test your chinese :P

我想参加 Mandarin Wikibook。 我有一些建议。在这儿。能不能麻烦您去看一下。

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Positive Psychology

I noticed you were working on a new psychology test. Interested in help yet? (I'm working on one myself, although just a tad less positive.) --Elaragirl 19:44, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

• snorts* 我无法教我们的语言. I am ... rusty. Worse than rusty. But still, the Chinese book seems to be coming along nicely on it's own. As for positive psychology, I'm a mental health professional and I have some pretty good access to psychological libraries. I think positive psychology is overlooked, since (don't laugh) people actually prefer to feel miserable than happy so that they have something to complain about. Or maybe I'm getting cynical. :) Still, I'll see what I can come up with for you. --Elaragirl 14:47, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Spam!

Thanks for picking that up. I've checked the IP and it is black listed in places so I've blocked it for a while - regards --Herby ^{talk thyme} 08:37, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Just wanted to say thanks for working on the book. I'm shamelessly using it to get ahead before I take up Chinese this next year. I was wondering how close Lesson 2 was to being finished too. I was hoping eventually I could contribute, I was thinking in the vocab section, to give characters separate pages where you detail stroke order, former incarnations of the character, and maybe a brief history. I know Japanese, so I have some of this information on hand (at least for the more obvious characters). Anyway, keep up the great work! --Hygiene

Do you want to volunteer as a potential member of editorial boards?

See Wikibooks:Volunteer_editors

Also Wikibooks:Editorial board,Wikibooks:Wikipublish and the discussion in the staff lounge. RobinH 15:08, 14 January 2007 (UTC)