Students of Spanish

[zeppo]

One of the main reasons I thought of investing in an ereader was to help with learning Spanish - that is, I wanted to read spanish text and easily grab the translation of words. I have held out for a touch Kindle thinking the gains in the ease of accomplishing this would be worth the wait.

I also liked the free wireless on what is now called the Kindle Keyboard with 3G. I thought if I traveled it would be worth the extra $50 for email access since I doubt free wifi is as easily accessed abroad as it is in the US.

So now after finding that the Kindle Touch 3G won't allow email access, I am left with the added benefit that a touch dictionary may provide in translating Spanish. Before I can even weigh that comparison, I'd have to know that there is even a worthwhile Spanish to English dictionary available for the touch (will find the root of conjugated verbs or verbs with attached pronouns, or even works at all for that matter.)

I'm kind of surprised that a google search hasn't pulled up a lot of interest in the Kindle Touch by students of Spanish. To me it would seem to be a great primary tool. But at least I've found this thread about the functionality of dictionaries:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=159096

But I have started a new thread in hopes that students of Spanish can comment on how well the Kindle Touch is working out for them in terms of the effectiveness and ease of use in translating Spanish as you read please let us know. Also, if you have previously used the Kindle Keyboard for this purpose and compare the two for this use, please do.

Thanks!

[gdornick]

Hi Zeppo,

Since last year I am studying Spanish.
I use my Kindle 3 for reading spanish texts a lot.
I bought the Kindle edition of "Merriam-Webster's Spanish-English Translation Dictionary" at Amazon and set it as my primary dictionary. It works quite well and I am very happy I bought it.

Via Calibre I download newspapers like El País and El Mundo, or use Instapaper to download spanish texts.

I guess this would also work for the Kindle Touch?

I am eager to hear about more ways to use the Kindle for studying Spanish.

Gaal.

[zeppo]

thanks for the reply, Gaal. I am still trying to decide between the Kindle 3G Keyboard and the Kindle Touch with 3G wireless. I picked up the Keyboard for $85 on sale, but I haven't opened it yet, since the Target rep indicated it would need to be unopened.

It seems to me the touch capabilities would make reading spanish that much easier when using the dictionary to translate, rather than having to move the cursor around. So that is the main draw to me to get a Touch. The ability of the touch to use to fingers to zoom in and out when web browsing is a nice feature that is not found on the Keyboard, but since browsing is limited on the Touch, not sure how big an advantage that is.

On the other hand, if I were to spend sometime abroad to study, I might save quite a bit of money having the free 3G of the Keyboard to communicate back home, whereas the Touch with 3G wouldn't give me email access.

The Keyboard also can get RSS feeds sent to its free.kindle email address without a fee if you set the maximum charge limit at zero, whereas the Touch 3G would have fees (no way around it.)

decisions, decisions

[lloydsmith]

As an advanced student of Spanish, I don't need a translation dictionary but would like to have a monolingual Spanish dictionary so that when I am reading in Spanish and find a word I'm not sure about I could quickly access the Spanish dictionary. So far I haven't found out how to get my Kindle Touch 3G to recognize when it should reference the Spanish dictionary. I have set it as the default dictionary but it shows up filed under ENGLISH in the dictionary section of the Kindle and I don't know how to change it. Would appreciate any help.

[vakya]

Gdornick te recomiendo también las noticias de bbc mundo en español, al ser noticias más cercanas a tu país. Y por otro lado hay varios sitios con multitud de libros en castellano (aquí se le llama castellano al español).

[miguelos]

@lloydsmith have you tried this :
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=157742

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by lloydsmith

As an advanced student of Spanish, I don't need a translation dictionary but would like to have a monolingual Spanish dictionary so that when I am reading in Spanish and find a word I'm not sure about I could quickly access the Spanish dictionary. So far I haven't found out how to get my Kindle Touch 3G to recognize when it should reference the Spanish dictionary. I have set it as the default dictionary but it shows up filed under ENGLISH in the dictionary section of the Kindle and I don't know how to change it. Would appreciate any help.

You need to change the language code of the dictionary. Calibre can do this.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You need to change the language code of the dictionary. Calibre can do this.

Unlike regular ebooks, Mobipocket dictionaries have 3 language parameters:
Document Language, Input Language and Output Language.

AFAIK, Calibre can only change the document language, but not the other two language parameters. I.e. changing the document language of a dictionary usually doesn't help, because the Kindle selects the lookup dictionary based on the input language. (At least that's the case with my Kindle Keyboard.)

You can check (and modify) the language parameters of a dictionary with the latest version or the Java Mobi Metadata Editor.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Unlike regular ebooks, Mobipocket dictionaries have 3 language parameters:
Document Language, Input Language and Output Language.

AFAIK, Calibre can only change the document language, but not the other two language parameters. I.e. changing the document language of a dictionary usually doesn't help, because the Kindle selects the lookup dictionary based on the input language. (At least that's the case with my Kindle Keyboard.)

You can check (and modify) the language parameters of a dictionary with the latest version or the Java Mobi Metadata Editor.

Ah, OK. Thank you for the correction.

Presumably, though, you could do it the other way around: if your Spanish dictionary is marked as English, you could use Calibre to set the language code of your Spanish book to "English", so that your selected "English" (really "Spanish") dictionary would be used for the lookup?

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Ah, OK. Thank you for the correction.

Presumably, though, you could do it the other way around: if your Spanish dictionary is marked as English, you could use Calibre to set the language code of your Spanish book to "English", so that your selected "English" (really "Spanish") dictionary would be used for the lookup?

That would work, but you'd have to define this Spanish dictionary as the default English dictionary.
BTW, this method is used for Latin books and dictionaries, since there's no Mobipocket language code for Latin.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

That would work, but you'd have to define this Spanish dictionary as the default English dictionary.

Yes, that's what I meant. It would mean having to change the default dictionary when you read a book in a different language, but it's perhaps an easier solution than trying to edit the dictionary.