eBook reader for language learning

[takikura]

Originally Posted by ficbot

I read in French on my Kindle. Two problems I have had with it:
- it limits you to one language per book. I have a Jules Verne omnibus which has his complete works, and what they did is use English translations where available, and if a translation was not available, they included the French version rather than omit it completely. The kindle treats this omnibus as an English book (and it 80% is) so if I want to use the French ditionary to read the French parts, I have to manually change it over. With books it recognizes as French books, it will use the proper dictionary automatically.

I thought I had to always select a corresponding dictionary when I change a book in a language to one in another on my Kindle. It looks this not correct.
But this explains a problem I once had. One of my German books did not work with the Pons GE-EN dictionary. Checking words on this book did not show results. I checked the meta data of this book to find it as marked as an English book. After changing it to be a German book. The dictionary worked with the book. Now I understand the Kindle assigned an English dictionary to this book automatically even thought the German dictionary is selected as a PRIMARY dictionary. I will verify this, when I go home. I am now traveling in Oporto.

[takikura]

Originally Posted by Polyglot27

I already read English, French, Japanese and Chinese. My latest ambition is to learn Turkish properly. The grammar is similar to Japanese (agglutinative) and not overly difficult. Any suggestions for websites and software on Ubuntu or Android are welcome. By the way, Takikura-san, I am 69 and time is running out even faster for me.

I did not know that Turkish is an agglutinative language. I knew Hungarian and Finnish languages are in the same category. Watching those F1 Finnish drivers on TV it is not easy to imagine that we Japanese have the same root with these people.
I started to learn German at the age of 60, as I saw a Japanese TV program showing a guy who is now 103 years old and is a school master of a special school of retarded children. This program was made when he was 98. He started to lean Korean at the age of 65 and speak it now fluently. He started to lean Chinese at the age of 95. He was invited to Chine to set up a similar school there, as his unique method of helping these children was highly appreciated there. The program showed him making a speech in Chinese at the opening ceremony of the Chinese school when he was 98 years old. Doctors examined his brain to find his hippocampus size to be that of 70 years old people. They believe his effort of learning the Korean language helped to slow his hippocampal atrophy (shrinkage). I am hoping leaning this even more complicated German will reverse my hippocampal atrophy. Poliglo27: Good luck with the Turkish language and let's enjoy language learning till 120 years old, when our body cannot really support our growing hippocampus.

[takikura]

Hi

I have created a file of test sentences in German for testing various ebook readers and dictionaries. The results are shown on the Dictionary efficiency.pdf. Numbers shown on the excel sheet are number of clicks, taps and imputes on the screen to reach the final dictionary pages showing basic words from declined or conjugated forms of the words in the test sentences.

You can see the Onyxreader is the best reader for German books among those tested as far as dictionary function is concerned. The Sony reader handles the German text quite well but I prefer Langenscheidt dictionary to Collins. The Kindle dictionary software can not handle separable verbs properly. We need to have elementary knowledge of German grammar to use the ColorDict on the Android tablet. GolderDict is not better than the ColorDict. I ask you, who have PocketBook readers, Kindle touch and the newer Sony reader, to do the same test and show me the results.

The attached zip files contain the exel sheet of Dictionary Efficiency to which you can add your test results and the test sentences in various formats, such as ePub, pdf, mobi, bet, text, docx and lit.

Thanks takikura

Dictionary efficiency.pdf

Test sentences.doc

Dictionary efficiency.zip

test sentences.zip

[Zetmolm]

The Boox dictionary function does not support declined or conjugated forms. How did you find them in one click???

[takikura]

Originally Posted by Zetmolm

The Boox dictionary function does not support declined or conjugated forms. How did you find them in one click???

Hi Zetmolm

I am glad that you have asked this question. The original Boox dictionary is a crap. I was really disappointed when I bought it for the purpose of learning German and tested the first page of my elementary German reader titled "Anna in Berlin". Fortunately a guy developed a reader for Boox 60 which he named "Onyxreader". I am referring to this reader on my Boox, not the original. You can download the reader and related tools from the following page. They are freeware. Installation is very simple as shown on the page.

http://terol.pw/content/?Onyx_Boox

Please feel free to contact me, if you have problems with its installation.

Takikura

[Zetmolm]

Hi Takikura, thank you for your reply. I had a look at "Onyxreader". Installation is indeed simple, but you must convert your books and dictionaries before you can use it, which may be quite an obstacle for many people (although the tools seem to work like a charm). The reader program works OK but lacks a lot of features of the original Book reader programs. The biggest disappointment for me is that "Onyxreader" does not support Russian dictionaries (or in general, dictionaries using non-Latin alphabets), which are practically the only dictionaries I need on my Boox.

[takikura]

Originally Posted by Zetmolm

Hi Takikura, thank you for your reply. I had a look at "Onyxreader". Installation is indeed simple, but you must convert your books and dictionaries before you can use it, which may be quite an obstacle for many people (although the tools seem to work like a charm)..

I do not know why Eduardo decided to use the text based formats. For me this is rather an advantage than a disadvantage. Since I use this reader for learning German, I often need few weeks and even few months to read a German book. So spending few minutes for converting a epub book to this format is not an issue. Since the books and dictionaries are text based, I can edit them with an editor with regular expression functionality. I did not like the way my English - Japanese dictionary was displayed, I removed some redundant characters to make them rendered nicely on the screen. Eduardo, being extremely busy guy, may have chosen the text format to let us easily manipulate the books and dictionaries rather than to change his own software.

The reader program works OK but lacks a lot of features of the original Book reader programs..

When I read English or Japanese books on eBook readers, I hardly use any other functions of eBook reader than "next page". The only function I miss with the OnyxReader is the function just to mark words checked with the dictionary. I do not need to leave a note or comment on the words, wasting my limited time available, but want them high-lighted. When I can not remember them, I could just click on them and instantly its meanings are shown in full screen. OnyxReader has a function to leave a log file recording the words checked with the dictionaries. This can substitute my wish.

The biggest disappointment for me is that "Onyxreader" does not support Russian dictionaries (or in general, dictionaries using non-Latin alphabets), which are practically the only dictionaries I need on my Boox.

I have not realized this fact. I assume you meant a dictionary for reading Russian texts. As I wrote in the above, my English - Japanese dictionaries work well as shown on the following photo.



Now I have to stop here for dinner.

takikura

[jocampo]

Originally Posted by takikura

I agree with your opinion on immersive teaching method. The problem is only a limited type of people can afford it. My friend, teaching English in a Japanese university, used to tell me that we should read more than 10,000 pages of English text to become decently proficient with this language. I have done that and I believe my written English is not so bad. But I speak broken English and have enormous difficulty of understanding films in English without helps of subtitles. I do not dream of attaining a decent speaking capability of the German language. My brain is too old and jammed to process all these word changes real time. But I hope that I can some day achieve skills of reading German books relatively fast with a help of a good reader and writing decent sets of mail and letters in this language.

If you want to speak a foreign language ... find an online buddy, speak! ... that's the faster and only way to learn a foreign language, talking by experience. Skype is a good tool and there are tons of free websites or forum where you can engage other users and practice speaking that foreign language. You can also teach yours as well.

After 11 years in school, I was not able to speak fluent English until just a few years ago when I was relocated to USA because my job. My English is not perfect, but I think and speak in English.

Reading is a different matter. If your focus is being able to read and write properly then grab a nice book on that language, a dictionary, another book with rules of that foreign language and have some fun.

[takikura]

Originally Posted by jocampo

After 11 years in school, I was not able to speak fluent English until just a few years ago when I was relocated to USA because my job. My English is not perfect, but I think and speak in English.

After 11 years of learning English in school most of Japanese have hard time to say even "How do you do?" Japan is much open now compared to when I lived there. But still we do not have many chances of speaking with native English speakers there. There are low cost English courses using Skype.

Reading is a different matter. If your focus is being able to read and write properly then grab a nice book on that language, a dictionary, another book with rules of that foreign language and have some fun.

My problem is I have too many of these learning materials. I spend far more time reading about and searching good materials for learning German than actually learning it. I spend more time trying to figure out which is the best eReader for learning German than learning it. I know this is stupid, but it is very hard to stop.

[takikura]

Hi

Somewhere in the above I wrote the GoldenDict is not better than the ColorDict. This was because I always found one additional space after words which the ezPDF sent to the GoldenDict. This was not the case with the ColorDict. I thought this is stupid. We had a holiday in Germany and it was Buddha's birthday. Then I remember the famous words of wisdom. "When you think something or somebody is stupid, you may be more stupid than it/he/she is." Then I spent sometime yesterday to find someone on the Internet who has the same opinion on the GoldenDict with mine. Instead, I found the following description on the GoldenDict.

•Hunspell-based morphology system, used for word stemming and spelling suggestions

I installed the German Hunspell dictionary to find the GoldenDict behave completely different. I added this new test results in the following dictionary efficiency pdf.

Dictionary efficiency.pdf

takikura

[ficbot]

Update: discovered the other day that the iPad Kindle app DOES let you use foreign language dictionaries and it does recognize them automatically e.g. I installed the French dictionary for a French book and it automatically reverted back to the English dictionary when I used an English book later. It is only good for single words though---I am going to continue to use a different app for now until I am more comfortable with the verb tenses; I still find I like the Google Translate plugin my other app has (even though it requires you to be on-line, which doesn't always work for me) because I can translate conjugated phrases as opposed to just single words.

I do think that once I get more comfortable with the verbs, the Kindle app may be sufficient in and of itself.

[frostschutz]

Originally Posted by takikura

But I speak broken English and have enormous difficulty of understanding films in English without helps of subtitles.

Subtitles are false friends... they don't always match what's being said and they distract you from listening. If you can turn the subtitles off (on a DVD etc.), watch the movie twice, first time with subtitles so you understand the story, second time without so you can concentrate on the spoken language. I do this for Japanese and it helps me a lot.

It doesn't help at all with speaking though. The only way to speak is to speak; I use English all day and I can watch movies without subtitles, but I never get the chance speak... so my spoken English is a bad joke...

My favourite English/German dictionary is http://dict.leo.org and for Japanese it's http://www.wadoku.de but it's utterly useless for German->Japanese. In Japan if you need a German dictionary you'd probably just get yourself a Denshi Jisho but unfortunately there don't seem to be any that combine this with eReader capabilities.

If you want to get in touch with Japanese learners from Germany, try http://www.japanisch-netzwerk.de

I can definitely recommend Anki for studying vocabulary or even whole sentences... it's a great software. Without it I'd have given up on Japanese a long time ago...

[takikura]

Hi ficbot

Would you prepare French test sentences like my German test sentences and the Excel sheet like mine titled dictionary efficiency. Then I can test how efficient are the OnxyReder and some apps on on my Android tablet for French sentences.
Eduardo, the Almighty who created OnyxReader, said he tested his reader against English, German and Spanish. Thus, it may not work for French well but I assume the GoldenDict should work OK with French Hunspell dictionary and some StarDict French dictionary I have.
Takikura

[ficbot]

What information do you need, Taikikura?

My issue is that French uses compound tenses, so if I want to translate something that would be their equivalent to, for instance, 'I would have gone' I can't do it by touching only a single word. So I look at the phrase and I recognize the individual components (a form of to be, a form of to go') but I am not confident enough about the verbs to know if it's I would have gone, or I went, or I used to go. I need to be able to select multiple words for that...

[takikura]

Hi frostschutz

Originally Posted by frostschutz

Subtitles are false friends... they don't always match what's being said and they distract you from listening.

I know that often subtitles are different from what are said in films, especially those available on the Internet.
I watch three movies each weekend, having diner with wine. With most of films I sleep during the latter half of them.

If you can turn the subtitles off (on a DVD etc.), watch the movie twice, first time with subtitles so you understand the story, second time without so you can concentrate on the spoken language. I do this for Japanese and it helps me a lot.

I have many movie scenario books which transcribe precisely what are said in films. I intend to use these books for training my ears by watching these films without subtitles, as you suggested, when I retire and have more time.

My favorite English/German dictionary is http://dict.leo.org and for Japanese it's http://www.wadoku.de but it's utterly useless for German->Japanese.

I agree that Leo dictionary is excellent. I can find almost any words which I can not find on other German-English dictionaries.

In Japan if you need a German dictionary you'd probably just get yourself a Denshi Jisho but unfortunately there don't seem to be any that combine this with eReader capabilities.

I have lots of Denshi Jisho (Electric dictionaries). They are installed on my PC and tablets and viewed with EPWING viewers.

If you want to get in touch with Japanese learners from Germany, try http://www.japanisch-netzwerk.de

I did not know about this site. I will try to read the site with a help of Google translator.

I can definitely recommend Anki for studying vocabulary or even whole sentences... it's a great software. Without it I'd have given up on Japanese a long time ago...

I have installed the Anki apps on my PC and my tablet. I really should start using them. I assume the Japanese language is extremely difficult for German people to learn. I read long time ago an article on a magazine on languages, saying Japanese and German are the first and the last languages when languages are listed in the oder of how sentences are affected by contexts they are in.

takikura