Languages

About single-serving.com

Purpose | Qualifications | Errors/Accuracy | Copyright/Usage | Advertising/Cookies/Privacy | Contact | Character Sets | Flags

Purpose

My goal is to create the best phrase guides and language aides on the web and the most useable maps and trail guides. My purpose is not as clear. I am obviously putting a lot of personal time and money into it. My purpose is really to be satisfied that I have a fantastic product. Of course I dream of being able to someday live from something that I'm doing on the web. I could then live anywhere, or travel anywhere, and still be at work. (But how realistic is that?) Why should you believe my phrase guides? Here are my

Language Qualifications

I have no framed qualifications that I can hang on a wall and prove anything with (well, OK, a couple). I am very interested in languages and have a lot of experience. I am a native English speaker and grew up speaking Croatian at home. I took four years of Spanish in high school and have taken over 500 hours of German in Germany. I speak German very well and spent one semester at a German university. I have lived in Italy, Hungary and Bosnia as well and always made major efforts to learn as much of a language as I could. I have worked as a translator for the US Army as well as for private companies that contract to the Army. My father speaks eight languages and has worked as a translator and other language related jobs. My mother speaks five languages and has taught Spanish at the high school level. None of this qualifies me as a linguist, but it gives me a good background.
In order to (hopefully) eliminate errors, I am establishing content with redundant questioning of native speakers and literature. Once the content is completed, I actively seek feedback from users. Here is my policy on

Errors/Accuracy

This site may contain errors! Errors are fixed as soon as possible. Languages and maps are very complex and the definition of correct language may vary from speaker to speaker. If you note any errors in the content, please send an e-mail to: info@single-serving.com. Each language section is checked by two native speakers before being published as final. This does not guarantee correctness. In cases where common usage differs from correct usage, the common usage is often used. In cases where the spoken and written forms differ, the spoken form is usually used. These guides are meant to be quick help in learning some usage and pronunciation, not a strict grammar guide.

Copyright

This is all free for personal use. Please use these tools to help you learn, tell people about it and link to this site. However, all links must be to html pages. I don't want anyone to link directly to sound or acrobat files. No use other than personal or teaching in public schools without written permission.

Advertising/Cookies/Privacy

This site uses no cookies and collects no data other than user feedback. I am trying to get the site to pay for itself to grow more. I have reluctantly decided to use google's adsense advertising. I plan on using the earnings to pay someone to help me edit audio files and work on some html. I will remove it if it doesn't seem to help the site grow and expand. Watch for lots of addtional foreign language audio in 2005 if this proves fruitful.

Contact

E-mail me at: info@single-serving.com. Or write to:

Character Encoding

I have decided to use full character sets, rather than simplifying the languages. This means that a lot of people won't be able to view some of the languages that don't use Latin-1. I think that if people want to learn about a language, then they should get into it and install foreign character set support and foreign fonts. Some people may not be able to install, because of the age of their computers, computers at work or libraries where installing external stuff is illegal, or whatever. I hope that I don't alienate too many people. I will eventually add transliterated pages for the non-latin based languages, and still have no idea what i'll do about the Asian languages. I have started making a page that displays the various character sets, but it's not done yet. I'm also a little slow on picking up Unicode, but all future language pages will be encoded with Unicode.

Flags

Flags are used in this site to represent the different languages, despite there often not being a one-to-one correlation between language and country. Flags are political tools, whereas language is cultural. For example: Austrians don't necessarily enjoy clicking on a German flag to get their language, but it has become a standard and as a result, is easily understood.

    The flags are all different sizes because each country decides what aspect ratio is's flag will have. For more information about flags, please see: Flags of the World or Flags.net. All flags here are created by single-serving and have my best effort at correct colors and aspect ratios. I have a list of flag aspect ratios that I use for myself to set this confusing issue straight.

single-serving primarily uses these colors:

orange: e99d52
beige: efefce
green: aecfb5
red: b73135
black: 333132
anti-alias color for striped background: f4eeca

please e-mail me at info@single-serving.com. Contact me as well, if you have any ideas or want to help. If your comments result in a change I'll send you a t-shirt or something.

enjoy!

Here are some internal tests that I am doing for myself.

If you've read this far, you might actually enjoy looking at some ridiculous self-promotion that has been done mostly as a joke.