Plain Lab · notebook

Language Insert

Forty vocabulary pages pair a word with its handwriting practice row, and eighty-two more pages hold the sentences a single word can't carry.

Specification

Trim: 127 × 177.8 mm · 5 × 7 in
Pages: 128
Leaves: 64
Sheets: 32
Signatures: 4 × 32pp
Spine: 7.32 mm
Paper: white
Ruling: handwriting
Ruling pitch: 10.58 mm · 30.00 pt
Rows per page: 13

A word on its own does not tell you how to hold a pen when writing it. Forty vocabulary pages give each entry a row of handwriting practice at 10.58 mm pitch, thirteen rows to the page, so a new character or a foreign spelling gets copied by hand rather than only read.

Eighty-two pages of plain notes follow, for the sentence a single word sits inside, a grammar rule that needs an example rather than a definition, or a page of nothing but conjugations written out until they stop looking foreign. The same ruling carries both sections, so a note can slide into practice rows without a change of pitch partway down the page.

I copied out vocabulary lists for two languages before noticing I was copying the shape of the word and not its sound. The book will not catch that for you. It only gives the copying somewhere steady to happen.

What is inside

Vocabulary: 40pp; One entry per row at 10.58 mm handwriting pitch, for the word and the hand that copies it.
Notes: 82pp; Plain pages at the same pitch for sentences, grammar and anything a single entry can't hold.

The film

Page by page

A vertical film from our own bench — this page contacts nobody's server to play it, and downloads nothing until you press play.

A vertical film, 27 seconds: the ruling page and the figures printed on its last leaf. Synthesised ambient bed, no dialogue — captions in three languages.