Interactive alphabet books

Use Chrome or Firefox to view the alphabet books. The overview table includes links to each book and a summary of features.

Please look at one or two alphabet books and provide feedback in a questionnaire here.

The alphabet books use a variety of different ways to present information.

• Audio. Clicking on words plays audio.
• Images. Pictures of objects illustrating letters.
• Clickable images. Images contain clickable areas.
• Video. Video can be used to show sign language or just for entertainment value.
• Examples. Example sentences for letters and words.
• Phonetic text. Ability to spell out words letter by letter.
• Contrasting pairs. Letters presented together with closely related ones.
• Letter variants. In some languages, letters can be written in more than one way depending on context.
• Grammar information. It is possible to get grammatical information about words.

You can find more details on the different alphabet books below.

Arabic (Catherine Orian Weiss)

(Link to book) Learn Arabic script and names of animals. Flip between word view and letter view. There is a short satisfaction questionnaire here. There is a Goodreads page here.

English (Manny Rayner)

(Link to book) Learn correspondences between letters and sounds in English in a "Little Prince" themed alphabet book. Flip between semantic view (click on pictures), phonetic view (click on letters) and examples.

Farsi (Elham Akhlaghi)

(Link to book) Learn Farsi script and some basic vocabulary. Flip between word view and letter view.

French (Manny Rayner and Christèle Maizonniaux)

(Link to book) Learn correspondences between letters and sounds in French in a "Little Prince" themed alphabet book. Flip between semantic view (click on pictures), phonetic view (click on letters) and examples. There is a Goodreads page here.

Hebrew (Rina Zviel-Girshin)

(Link to book) Learn Hebrew script. Click on letters to hear their names, or speaker icons to hear the whole word.

Icelandic (Branislav Bédi)

(Link to book) Learn the sounds of Icelandic and some basic grammar. Click on words to hear audio. Click "grammar information" on right to find out about Icelandic nouns.

Icelandic Sign Language (The Communication Centre for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Iceland)

(Link to book) Learn the 33 basic handshapes of Icelandic Sign Language. Click on pictures to see sign language videos.

Irish (Neasa Ní Chiaráin)

(Link to book) Alphabet book designed around contrasting pairs that illustrate the principles of Irish phonetic and orthography, in particular the crucial palatalisation-velarisation contrast. Click on words to hear audio.

Slovak (Ivana Horváthová)

(Link to book) Game for learning the Slovak alphabet. Slovak ABC where letter shapes are hidden in the images.

Ukrainian (Marta Mykhats)

(Link to book) Minimalistic but effective alphabet book for Ukrainian: really a poem in the form of an alphabet book. There is a Goodreads page here.