How to get started

[Jan <jandersen striva com>]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to international language programming, although I've been
a programmer for over 20 years now. Where do I start? (In terms of how
best to prepare myself for the task: what to read etc).

My project is as follows: I am studying Chinese and I want to make a
simple tool that I can use for making linguistic notes - something like
a 'dictionary', more or less. It would allow me to enter Chinese
phrases, their pronunciation in eg. pinyin and/or bopomofo and comments
in English or any language I might choose at the time (perhaps even a
mix?), and it should have search facilities - especially a radical index.

Apart from the obvious things, such as a simple database to hold my
notes, I realise that I need to communicate with whatever controls input
methods on Linux (as well as perhaps other UNIXes?) and I need to
display Chinese fonts. I already use Redhat 8 which gives me Chinese
environment as well as Glade for designing the X applications. All I
need, really, is information about where to start reading.

Oh, and one more thing: I am going to program in C/C++. Perl, Tcl, Java,
COBOL, FORTRAN, JCL etc are al very wonderful, but I am a C programmer,
so that's what I will use. IOW: please don't tell me that I should use
any of those tools.

/jan