We've published a series of educational books for Chinese learners and we need a new method to introduce new vocabulary. It's a bit complicated and I need some ideas on how to do it better! This is the situation.
- The book is written in Chinese but it's for people who are learning Chinese.
- Throughout the book, we introduce new Characters and words which the learner does not know.
- At each occurrence of a new word, a numbered footnote is there to indicate it is a new word and provides a hyperlink to the glossary with the pronunciation and definition.
The Problem
New words and characters are repeated throughout the book. Therefore, the footnote appears every time the word does. The footnotes break up the flow of reading especially in sentences and paragraphs that use many of the new words. I want to come up with some alternative to the footnotes, but what?
One idea I've considered is a footnote at the first occurrence but some other non-intrusive indicator afterwards to indicate it's a vocab word. We want the new method to be used on all devices so we can't use color-code (which may not show up on black and white readers) and we can't use
underlining because that is already used to denote proper nouns.
Any ideas please! Here is a sample of our epub so you can get an idea of what we're doing. Thanks!
liushi_niande_meng_4.3_High_Res_Sample.epub