13369 Did this ever happen to you? This week, while setting up an iPod nano I bought for my wife, I inadvertently switched the display language setting to a language I don't understand 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 but still very serviceable original 5 GB iPod, I hadn't quite adapted yet 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 assorted and now inscrutable menus, completely clueless to what the labels signified, I consulted J.D. Biersdorfer's iPod: The Missing Manual in hope 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.

Good old Google. The first hit was an excellent iPod How-To resource by DigitalMania ( http://www.digitalmania-online.com/iPod-HowTo.html ) that consists of an index of Apple Knowledge Base iPod support articles, and sure enough, 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."

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 Apple Knowledge Base article is entitled "iPod: Changing the display language," and you can find it here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60956

If you're an iPod user,I suggest bookmarking or otherwise recording that URL for future reference.

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.

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.

Tags: iPod ï iPod How To ï

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