Did this ever happen to you? While setting up an iPod nano I bought
for my wife, I unintentionally switched the iPod's display language
setting to a language I couldn't read and whose characters I couldn't
even recognize. I'm guessing it might have been Korean.
Being used to the generously-sized clickwheel and real mechanical
control buttons of my ancient original 5 GB iPod, now
unfortunately out of commission due to a hard drive failure, I hadn't
quite adapted to the nano's tiny capacitance actuated controls, I guess
I was a bit ham-fisted, but the mistake seemed to happen quite easily
and effortlessly.
Anyway, after spending a half-hour or so blundering through the
machine's assorted and now inscrutable menus, completely clueless to
what the labels signified, I consulted J.D. Biersdorfer's iPod: The Missing Manual in hopes it
would provide a solution to my dilemma. It did tell me how to reset the
iPod's settings to defaults, but that didn't switch it out of the
unfamiliar language mode. I found that the iPod Help resource in iTunes
was no help with this problem either.
Increasingly frustrated and burning time I didn't have to spare on a
tightly scheduled day, I decided that this issue must be not that
unusual, although I had never experienced it with my old iPod. I dialed
up the Internet and typed "resetting language in iPod when you can't
read the language" into Google's
search field.
Google, as usual, came through. The first hit was an excellent iPod
How-To resource by DigitalMania,
which consists of an index of Apple Knowledge Base iPod support
articles. Bingo! The seventh title down the list read:
"How to
Change the iPod Display Language - Your iPod is multilingual and
can be set to display one of many languages. If you've accidentally
chosen the wrong language for your iPod, follow the steps on this page
to change the language display."
The Apple Knowledge Base article, "iPod: Changing the display
language", was just what I was looking for, and it's jolly that I found
it, because the language reset procedure, while not technically
complicated, involves enough to-ing and fro-ing that I doubt that I
would ever have hit the combination by trial and error.
The article contains step-by-step instructions for resetting the
display language in three classes of iPod: iPod nano or Fifth
Generation iPod (iPod with video); older iPods with color displays
(including iPod photo), and really old iPods (like mine) with
monochrome displays.
Long story short, the instructions walked me through the steps
necessary to restore English as the display language, and the nano was
soon intelligible again.
If you're an iPod user, I suggest bookmarking or otherwise recording
that URL for future reference.
Humble suggestion: It might be a good idea for Apple to include a
means of locking the display language once it's been set so it would
take at least two steps of deliberate user action to reset it. A
warning dialog would be nice as well.
