Puzzles
Puzzle Books & Posters in over 60 Languages!
A visual-spatial challenge for puzzlers worldwide, the new book and poster series "What's Missing?" arrived online in May 2013. The series challenges viewers to compare two pictures and locate missing numbers, letters, and/or words. As an added feature, the numbers, letters, and words are arranged on the page in a manner which often creates a larger gestalt or picture, similar to Pointillism in art. No knowledge of foreign language is necessary to enjoy the basic puzzles, and either Google Translate or a bilingual dictionary can be used to guess the word describing the picture, where relevant.
In the sample below, the number "1" forms a random design. In many of the puzzles found in this book series, the numbers, letters, or words form pictures of common entities, such as household items, cultural symbols, and animals.
The book series begins with numbers, operators, and English, and then takes a world tour through Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, focusing on languages with non-Roman characters. Towards the end of the series, the language selections return to Europe, visiting the Germanic and Romance languages, and ending in Scandanavia.
The posters, which are available from Zazzle, represent the full set of over 60 languages, while the puzzle book series currently consists of approximately 2/3 of this amount. The full list of languages is included below:
- Afrikaans
- Albanian
- Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics
- Arabic
- Armenian
- Azerbaijani
- Basque
- Bengali
- Bulgarian
- Chinese
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- English
- Estonian
- Filipino
- Finnish
- French
- Georgian
- German
- Greek
- Gujarati
- Hatian
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hmong
- Hungarian
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Kannada
- Khmer
- Korean
- Lao
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Macedonian
- Malay
- Maltese
- Marathi
- Neo-Tifinagh Berber Glyphs
- Norwegian
- Numbers
- Persian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Russian
- Sanskrit
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Spanish
- Swahili
- Swedish
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Thai
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Urdu
- Vietnamese
Books are available from CreateSpace and Amazon, and posters are available from Zazzle. Afree sample for download, with a puzzle in each of 10 languages, is available from theSchottenbauer Publishing website. A trailer video for the series is available from YouTube.
Teachers, educators, and psychologists may be interested in the series, "What's Missing? Puzzles for Educational Testing." Additional information is available on the page for Educational Testing.
