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I am having fun playing around making a dictionary app, one part of which is adding pages teaching about scripts. One script page is on Tibetan consonants. I am trying to keep every page extremely minimal so if you were using the site often, you wouldn't keep confronting paragraphs of prose which never changes between visits. It looks like this currently:

There is the Tibetan glyph, and a pronunciation/romanization hint below. I am thinking about adding a "play audio" button as well, and each will eventually be a link to a details page. This is nice for seeing an overview of the consonants (or alphabet if this were English). I can see it offering some benefit, even if it's not that much. Will have tons of other detail pages, but this is just one sample.

However, in doing this for other writing systems (scripts), like Chinese, Chinese has over 80,000 characters, not just ~30 like most alphabet systems. So right now the Chinese page is just a wall of glyphs which you can hardly even scroll through.

I could add the pinyin (Chinese pronunciation) below, but really that is for Mandarin (but Chinese glyphs can be used by Japanese, or Cantonese as well, amongst other languages), so that won't really be good. I have a separate page which shows the unicode U+1234 sort of values for each glyph, so don't need to do that here.... Basically wondering what could be done to "teach" about Chinese glyphs (without writing paragraphs), or allow for searching for something or something, not sure.

On the Chinese glyph page there will be animations for how to draw the glyph, its meanings, and its metadata. But what can go on a "character list" page sort of like this? To spruce things up. What are some things that could be done to offer some sort of value? I am not very good at thinking about building products and offering value, I am just interested in learning about multiple languages and writing systems, and am on my way to doing so, and looking for some help.

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    Sidenote on first screenshot: UI/UX recommendation, if you present text in size 6pt and also lightgrey on white, you're making users a hard time discerning them. Consider a black color and larger font to make it useful at a glance without the need to zoom in. Commented Sep 26, 2024 at 8:32
  • Sidenote on usefulness: I'd suggest making the tap on a phonem playing the audiofile and a long press showing the details. This way you could enhance learning by also listening and associating. Maybe even click several phonems together in an input field and then have the meaning displayed if it is a valid word from a dictionary (and also with audio playback feature) Commented Sep 26, 2024 at 8:37
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    You might want to take a broader picture. Rather than asking how to make such a page useful, consider if a page is useful for ideographic languages. In an alphabet the expectation is you learn the letters, and then you learn how to spell the words with them. But you mostly know the alphabet. In an ideographic language, learning the ideograms is part of the process of learning the words. Its likely that your users expect to be constantly presented with new ones. Commented Sep 26, 2024 at 14:12
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    So rather than a single reference page of ideograms, it might be worth considering something like a modal popup containing the information about that ideogram that you can access when looking at words. Commented Sep 26, 2024 at 14:14
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_orders Commented Sep 26, 2024 at 19:18

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You can take a look at icon pages to see how they present them. The most complete is Fontawesome where, in addition to the presentation page itself, each icon with its name, when you click on each one, a modal-carousel window appears with an infinite number of options.

Fontawesome icons

Icon's page

enter image description here

Icon info

Other sites like Flaticon have an alternative menu when hovering on each icon with some immediate options:

flaticon

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  • What about on mobile? Commented Sep 26, 2024 at 6:36
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    Well, those same pages have their mobile version, you can check for yourself how they work. Commented Sep 26, 2024 at 6:53
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Especially for the chinese wall of symbols or iconographic writings in general (hieroglyphs :D), I would suggest:

  • Forming categories. This will be a whole lot of work of course. Example categories:

    • Parts of ... a house (-> roof, wall, window, door, ...), a car, a shop, an animal, a Plant, tools, ...
    • and then categories for naming the items itself: Kind of ... houses (-> family house, villa/mansion, shop, church, ...), kind of cars, etc.
    • This could be combined with Danielillo's idea of using icons - in this case to represent the category, but could maybe also used to represent the meanings of the symbol. I do not know how many different meanings such a symbol could have though and if there are meanings fitting into different categories at the same time... this would make things complicated.

  • A search function. If all symbols are tagged with their meanings they could be "queried" by search function rather than "presented" as a scrollable list.

  • Structural categorization. Similar "looking" symbols could be presented as a "family of symbols". This might break them down into more manageable groups (maybe, I am no expert on the viability) - but will also mix all the meanings probably (I could imagine that structurally similar symbols does not imply a similar meaning necessarily).

    • Also, it might be possible that some more complicated symbols consists of other more simpler symbols which are combined in an overlay fashion. This should be considered as being "structurally similar" also.
    • And in an advanced way maybe even structurally similar in a "to be painted" way - Idk, something like: Has one vertical stroke, is finished with a horizontal line at the top, contains a (sub-)stroke being painted like our "H" or something in that line. The basis for this can probably be extracted from the animations you mentioned which show how to paint them.

Probably you need more than one kind of categorization to make all the symbols approachable. It sounds like an interesting and worthwhile project though!

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