How should non-English-speakers ask?

Question

I wanted to ask my first question here, but I just realized I can't since I don't know the name of the specific part I have problems with, not only in English, but also even in my own native language!

I already saw the terminology index but it did not contain enough part names and also was not easy to search and browse.

I realized there is even different terminology in American/British English for some parts. (Let alone Indian, Australian, oh... how many different English dialects are there?!)

So, the feature request:

I strongly think there must be a diagram picture of a bicycle with every single part indicated and named on it. Even more, pictures of different bicycle styles with each part connected with to the appropriate part name would help more novice bicycle-riders ask questions here.

Answer 1

You could ask two questions:

1. "What is the name of this part?" -- describe it as best you can and include a picture. Describe the physical attributes and what it does. The description will help make sure later visitors find your question when they have the same question. Even a lot of native English speakers don't know the names of some of the parts. It's likely somebody will answer this question very fast.
2. After getting that answer, ask your question about the part. It's possible once you know the name of the part you'll be able to find your question already answered somewhere on the site.

If you want (or somebody else thinks of it), adding it to the terminology index would be good.

I think two questions like that would work better than asking a single question, because asking about repairing a part you're trying to describe tends to be awkward.

Answer 2

There already is such a diagram, up at the Park Tool Co. website. At the moment, the diagram is up at parktool.com/blog/repair-help. (They've changed the URL in the past, so this link may break.) It would be redundant for us to duplicate that effort, so we've done something else instead:

This site also has a terminology index, a glossary of bike terms. The TI is somewhat different than the bike diagram you mention, but may also be of help. You can search it to maybe find what you're looking for, and when you have, please feel free to link to the individual answers in the text of a question or answer - each individual answer on that page is a single term, and can be linked to. The TI can still use some work, so please feel free to contribute or even ask questions to help make it better.

In general, if you're a little unclear on something, I'd just go ahead and post a question anyway, asking something like "what should I do when the thing-in-this-location-that-looks-like this breaks?" This site is collaboratively edited, after all. We can edit and clean up the question after the fact. (If you'd specifically like that kind of attention, leave a comment and someone'll do the edit.)

On the other hand, if you're a lot unclear on something, freiheit has some good suggestions, which I won't duplicate. I'll add another option: You could ask about it here in meta. Indicate that you want to ask a question about [topic] but would like some help cleaning up the text before going live with it.