User talk:Nofate

I saw the edit to your userpage and decided it'd be nice to welcome you to our Wikipedia. Thanks for joining!

If you've got any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me. :)

~Kylu ( u | t )  20:37, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

User page decoration
No matter how much decoration you do, the important thing isn't showing off your l33t page design skills, it's getting your information across to the reader.

My page is kinda a "centralized leading point" where I can get to what I want quickly and tell others about my goals regarding Wikipedia and other such information. I have a bad habit of including whatever the latest trick I find into the page, so at the moment it's heavily transcluded and graphical in nature.

If you're just wanting to add userboxes like you said, the best thing I could do would be to suggest "don't go overboard" and "check out userbox central and see which userboxes you like. I'd suggest staying away from anything that could offend someone else, since our job here is to be professional and neutral editors of articles. Not that I tend to edit many articles, but that's purely my failing. :)

The other thing I can suggest is: Go look at the userpages of other people. If you like how it's laid out, click "edit this page" and see how it works. If there's an interesting box or graphic they've used, make a copy of that part of the page into your own userspace (hint: try user:Nofate/test for a sandbox to play with.) Learn by doing. :)

Oh, very important for both your userpage and for editing elsewhere on here too: Use the "Show Preview" button religiously and make sure you always comment on your edits. Let's say you've got a good page going, you decide to add a userbox, and you make a dozen changes to it, saving each time (bad anyway!) After a dozen edits, you're fed up and decide to go back to what it was before.

...well, good thing you backed up the design! ...you didn't? Just click "History" at the top of your page, the date of the revision that works best, and then "Edit this page" up at the top.

You'll see a box that says "You are editing a prior version of this page. If you save it, any changes made since this version will be removed." That's fine. Type in your edit summary and click "Save page." That's called reverting, just so you know. Works on articles too, but please be careful of performing a revert! You'll get a note or two if you revert to a vandalized version or cause someone else's contributions to vanish, plus I bet you won't feel great once you find out you did it!

Hope this helps a bit... If you have more questions, feel free to stop by my talk page and ask. If you want to see how my userpage works, check the userpage map first, that way you know what part you're looking at! Each element of my userpage has an [edit] link to make it easier to view/edit that page. :)

Take care!

~Kylu ( u | t )  02:30, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks
Thanks for the advice on my improvement page. I'm somewhat aware of the fact that chinese is an isolating language, but my knowledge of it is very limited. The thing that perplexes me are words like "yixia (一下)" and such which add politeness. I also don't know when to add the slang ending to verbs (like shang 上), or which ones to add, but I'm assuming they are like the prepositions in English actions like "beat up," "hang out," "screw over," etc. I suggest setting up an account on the chinese wikipedia (you can see my userpage there). You could help a lot with transalting articles there. Good luck!--The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 14:28, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Actually, there's no real reason to think that "yi xia" ever adds any politeness to a word, all it really means is "a little bit" or "some" but there's no politeness overtones involved. I'm not sure what you mean by slang endings like shang (上) there certainly are slang endings used only when spoken but they are more like "a" (啊), "lo" 咯, or "ya" 呀 Actually there is a large number of these "kou qi" 口气 words and the only thing I can tell you about these is that you just get used to them over time. Also they change in China from place to place. After spending the last 4-5 years pretty much devoted to the language I have to say that learning Mandarin is only a tool for communicating in China. Most people in China don't speak Mandarin in the way in which they teach you in a U.S. university and there's two reason for that. The first is U.S. universities are heavily influenced by Taiwan and two the language material out there has been structured very linguistically over the last 10-15 years and tries to find a happy medium between the gobs of dialects you find in the country. I should actually call these accents because we're still talking about mandarin here. Unfortunately what we would normally think of as a dialect is more or less another language in China. This of course depends on your definition of accent, dialect and language which gets very muddled in China :-) One final note, if you're ever interested, somewhere I have digital copies of all my grammar notes provided by my prof from the University of Washington on Chinese.  There is some really good basic stuff there for prepositions and building block grammar.  But for more advanced stuff you'd either have to get to a major university's library or go directly to China cuz outside of that I haven't really found anything up to par.  Most people never really get into advanced grammar in Chinese unless they plan to get a job translating or live in China.  I actually do have a Chinese account on Wiktionary but not on Wikipedia yet.  I'd like to work a little on the 汉英 dictionary first and then move into translating articles when I have more time.  Best of luck with the IPA stuff.  Nofate 02:55, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Featured article work for WikiProject Writing Systems members
Hello WikiProject WS members, it's the ikiroid again, spamming for help.....this time, it's for working on an article. We're trying to bring the article about the International Phonetic Alphabet up to featured status, and it would be great if anyone from our project would be willing to lend a helping hand. You can make suggestions about what to improve in the article here, where we're keeping track of the article's renovation. Thanks for reading. Feel free to ask me any questions about the article's improvement.--The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 23:30, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Gwoyeu Romatzyh
Having seen your name as a participant on WP:WPW, I wondered whether you might like to have a look at Gwoyeu Romatzyh, which I've been trying to bring up to scratch (GA/A/FA?). Any comments appreciated. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 14:56, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

WPW newsletter
This is the project's first newsletter. If you have any questions, comments, or ideas about it, feel free to post it on WT:WPW. Thanks. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 23:16, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Your feedback is requested


WikiProject Writing Systems is conducting a poll regarding its future goals, and we have identified you as a person with a vested interest in the future of that project. Whether you are a member of the WikiProject, a frequent contributor, or a passerby with an interest in the subject, we want your input as to the future emphasis that the Writing Systems project will take. Please take a moment to peruse the entries and add your comments where you have an opinion. You can visit the poll by clicking here, or on the project image, 書, on the right.