Contents

Wikivoyage:Requests for phrasebooks

The following is a list of phrasebooks that are requested by readers or contributors of Wikivoyage. (Requests for other types of articles should be posted on Wikivoyage:Requested articles.) See the Phrasebook Expedition for notes on how to start a new phrasebook using the phrasebook article template.

If you have a phrasebook that needs to be written, please add it in a section below. The format for a request is:

*[[Name of language phrasebook]]. This is the reason that we need the phrasebook. -- ~~~~

Note that you don't have to put a justification on this page in order to start a phrasebook yourself! You can just plunge forward and start the phrasebook. Also, note that the phrasebook you are looking for may already exist – check the list of phrasebooks.

Requested phrasebooks

[edit source]
I'm very skeptical about such an article, which would be similar to explaining how to learn to read and write in English, Swahili and Finnish since they're all written in Roman letters. What useful guide could be written about how to learn to read and write in Arabic, Farsi, Mandinka and Malay in Arabic-based script? They use different letters, are members of different language families, and have different sounds. Ikan Kekek (talk) 17:12, 9 October 2025 (UTC)reply
We have Learning Devanagari. I don't know how useful that article is, or whether the considerations for Arabic script are similar. —Granger (talk · contribs) 14:23, 12 October 2025 (UTC)reply
I don't know, either, but tell me whether you think a "Learning Roman letters" would be useful, and you have the answer I'm alluding to. If all the languages that use Devanagari script use the same syllables and pronounce them pretty much the same way, that article might be useful. Or it could be useful to narrowly define an article to teach people to read and write Classical Arabic or, say, Urdu, specifically, but attempting to teach people how to read and write all languages that use the Arabic alphabet in one go is absurd. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:11, 12 October 2025 (UTC)reply
I agree that "attempting to teach people how to read and write all languages that use the Arabic alphabet in one go is absurd", and it is hard for me to imagine a "Learning Roman letters" article being particularly useful, at least for readers who are already familiar with at least one alphabetic script. (For readers who have never used an alphabetic script, maybe there would be value to an article explaining the basics of how an alphabetic script works, I'm not sure.) However, I know that the Arabic and Devanagari scripts are structured differently from ours, so I don't know if there is enough to learn about how the script actually works to justify a writing system guide to be used in conjunction with the phrasebooks. —Granger (talk · contribs) 19:59, 12 October 2025 (UTC)reply
I do know how to read and write in Jawi (Malay in Arabic letters), or did know enough to pass the class at the 6th-grade level and still can to some degree, and I know enough to know that it's very different from trying to read things in Arabic or Urdu. Arabic is an alphabet (scripts have to do with calligraphy, but the basic written units in Arabic are letters, not characters or syllables), but vowels are represented very differently in different languages, there are traditional spellings in Jawi that are quite different from phonetic Roman spellings, and the additional consonants needed in different languages also differ, so that for example, a nya in Malay is a pa in Urdu. I maintain that this is an overbroad topic, and that it would be better to deal with written Urdu completely separately from written Arabic, etc. It's possible that Farsi and Urdu writing might be similar enough to deal with in a single article, but we'd need someone who knows both languages to pass judgment on that. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:58, 13 October 2025 (UTC)reply