Languide

Communication-focused language guides built from markdown

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Japanese — pattern phrases with romaji

Spanish — reusable phrase templates

Features

• Scenario-based phrases — greetings, restaurants, hotels, shopping, transport, emergencies
• Pattern templates with [bracket] slots for customizable phrases
• Politeness tiers — casual, polite, and very polite variants
• Tables for all phrase collections (no inline lists)
• PDF generation via a single shell script with Pandoc + XeLaTeX
• Multi-language workspace under languages/<slug>/

Prerequisites

• Pandoc and a LaTeX engine (xelatex recommended)
• CJK font for Japanese/Chinese/Korean (e.g., Noto Sans CJK)

Quick Start

./scripts/build-guide.sh                     # build all guides
./scripts/build-guide.sh japanese            # build a single guide
./scripts/build-guide.sh --discover          # list available languages

Usage

Adding a New Language

The easiest way is with Claude Code:

claude "/create-language french"

This generates all 11 chapters following the system prompt, validates against the quality checklist, and reports phrase counts.

To add one manually:

1. Create languages/<slug>/chapters/ with numbered chapters following the structure below
2. Use agents/system-prompt.md as the generation prompt
3. Verify against agents/checklist.md
4. Run ./scripts/build-guide.sh <slug> to produce outputs/<slug>-guide.pdf

CLI Reference

./scripts/build-guide.sh [options] [LANGUAGE...]

Options:
  --languages-dir DIR   Directory containing language folders (default: languages)
  --output-dir DIR      Output directory for PDFs (default: outputs)
  --skip-font-check     Skip CJK font detection
  --continue-on-error   Keep going if a language fails
  --manifest FILE       Write build manifest JSON to FILE
  --discover            List available languages and exit

Fonts

CJK languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean) require CJK fonts. If glyphs are missing:

# macOS
brew install --cask font-noto-sans-cjk font-noto-serif-cjk

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install fonts-noto-cjk

Repository Layout

languages/<slug>/chapters/   Numbered markdown chapters (00-cover.md … 10-cultural-guide.md)
languages/<slug>/spec.md     Content specification for that language
agents/                      System prompt and quality checklist
skills/                      Claude Code skills for automating guide creation
scripts/build-guide.sh       Shell script for assembling chapters into PDFs
templates/                   LaTeX template for PDF styling
outputs/                     Built PDFs (gitignored)

Chapter Structure

Each guide contains 11 chapters:

Conventions

• Tables for all phrase collections — 4-column format: English | Target Language | Transliteration | Notes
• Pattern phrases with [brackets] for customizable slots
• Politeness tiers: Casual / Polite / Very Polite
• 50+ phrases per scenario chapter, 30+ for directions and emergencies
• No tourism tips — focus on how to communicate, not what to see

Agent Skill

This repo’s conventions are available as portable agent skills in skills/.

License

Apache-2.0