I have 5 pounds of mixed world coins from every corner of the globe and I never really worked much with large accumulations, my goal is to sort by country and date. How do I start?
Pull up NGC world coin price guide and start identifying your coins. I would sort by country first. Then after sorting by country, sort by denomination, or type and denomination. Then look in the price guide for the values of the type and denomination of the coin you are researching.
I know, sounds very novice let me rephrase, how is it best to identify to coins not in English and what denomination they are. What websites and resources are available? Some of these don't even use a numerical system
https://www.ngccoin.com/price-guide/world/ When you use the price guide fill in the country, region and denomination. They are all drop down menus. For the region I always use all regions. Don't fill anymore info then that or the price guide doesn't work well.
That is going to happen guaranteed. Save those until last. Then bring them back here and ask what country they are. I had to ask about 3 or 4 coins I had. There are some really knowledgeable people in this world coin forum.
Anything written in the Western alphabet, if you Google words you can make out, you'll find it quickly. And then if you're paying attention you'll recognize commonalities. As stated, for the non-Western ones you might need to ask on this forum, but hopefully once you know, you can recognize others from the same country. I can almost guarantee you're going to ask about Taiwan and Thailand because everyone does. So maybe save yourself some time and look up coins from those countries and you're bound to have some of them.
The old paper Krauses have a few pages in the beginning (at least in some of the older editions) that are well worth perusing. There are pictures of design elements that are associated with/indicative of various countries. Plus numbers/date reading. It can get you pretty far. I'm sure there's an online similar resource but sometimes there's nothing like flipping a few pages back and forth trying to find what you are after.
This. Set those aside and first sort alphabetically the ones that are easy to identify. The coins from Arabic nations and some of the Asian countries will be more difficult, but it's not rocket science. If you have a Krause world coins book, they have a reference guide in the front of the book to help you identify characters in foreign languages. For online reference, I recommend Numista over the NGC world coin site. I think you'll find Numista more helpful and easier to use than NGC. Lastly, if you strike out, post it here. Someone on the forum will be able to identify it for you.
I google "funny squiggly lines with a flower" for example. I think that was a Korean coin lol. But seriously.
This is a page that I have used for ID. http://worldcoingallery.com/Inst-ID/page1.html http://worldcoingallery.com/
