Quote:
Originally Posted by nhedgehog
I recommend AlReader in combination with Fora Dict and Fora Memo.
Why?
There are a number of good reading apps with dictionary support (FBReader, KoReader, Coolreader, Moonreader+, AlReader ...). Every one has its pros and cons.
But AlReader has an interesting feature for those who like to read in foreign languages.
AlReader is storing every looked up word in a file called:
dictionary_word.txt
There is an app called Fora Memo, which is able to open this file and use it as learning database. Fora Memo needs Fora Dict to look up those words. Actually there is a possibility in Fora Dict to store looked up words too. But you have to tell the app it every time to store it (file is called wordlist.properties). Fora Memo can open this file as learning database too.
Fora Dict is, as other dictionary apps too, supporting a variety of different dictionary formats, including stardict.
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Thank you for your interest.
I have extensively put to the test the reader apps and dictionaries that you recommend over these past few weeks and I suppose they all have their good points but I can't say I was happy with any of them. To put it in a nutshell... they generally remind me of old Windows applications designed twenty years ago rather than native Android stuff. Bottom line... the design & programming never let you forget that you're using software that incidentally lets you read a book.. rather than successfully emulating the feel of reading a printed book.
I looked at the dictionaries and found that the Livio line best covers my needs.. lots of content, including pronunciation, etymology, locutions... and sometimes quick and dirty translations of the word in a number of other popular languages.
Apart from English... Livio cover the four main languages of Western Europe (German, Spanish, French, Italian).. which considering their dictionaries come free of charge is not bad at all. Like Fora the Livio apps let you refer to a history of (up to) your last 1,000 lookups, something I find quite useful. One issue with these dictionaries is that they are based on the wiktionaries and as a result are more at the the work-in-progress stage and there are quite a few glaring holes... Even some commonly used words I am familiar with and I just need a quick reminder are altogether missing. The ergonomics also can be a little surprising -- don't I love it when for instance I get a "abcdefS: plural form of abcdef" and nothing else is displayed... amusing at first.. less so after a while & it does tend to happen a little too often... and worse case scenario.... after you manually enter "abcdef"... the app occasionally returns: "word not found"... or "did you mean such and such..." and provide a list of alternatives. Seriously, if the software is able to detect that whatever you are looking up is the plural (conjugated form... etc.) of something... why don't they take you there right away...!?
Quite by chance I eventually found one reader app that I do like. I hadn't bothered trying it out initially because it is called "PocketBook"... and since this happens to be the name of a brand of e-reading devices that I had heard of (popular in Europe.. I believe?) I thought it was just a front-end meant to provide easy access to the brand's online store.. along the same lines as the Kindle/Kobo/Nook reader apps. Where in fact it is a full-fledged general purpose epub reader with a really neat user interface that corresponds exactly to what I was looking for (a bit like Google Play Books in essence but with external dictionary support... and it does not force you to store your books in your Google library.
Unfortunately, this PocketBook reader is somewhat buggy (randomly brings up a popup telling you that it has stopped working... for reasons untold... and you have to restart it... occasionally becomes unresponsive with a gray-ish or black background... sometimes opens the wrong book when invoked from another program such as a web browser or a file explorer..).
But perhaps its worst shortcoming in the context of mobile devices with limited storage space is that it does not play well with "network libraries". One thing in particular that bothers me is that it downloads a permanent copy of any e-book you access off of your cloud storage to your local drive. Nothing wrong with keeping a temporary copy of the file for performance reasons... but leaving it lying around (and in a non-obvious place to boot) once you've finished reading the book doesn't make sense.
CJ