Looking up more than 4 characters/words on the kindle in dictionary

[iwayasu]

As everyone knows, you can highlight word on a kindle to look them up in dictionaries. However, when you highlight more than four words, there will be no option to look it up. Its not much of a problem in most languages, but happens to be a real pain when reading Japanese, as each character counts for a word. Is there anyway to look up more than 4 words at a times somehow (perhaps through jailbreaking)? I tried searching for this but there doesn't seem to be any existing discussion on this anywhere.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by iwayasu

As everyone knows, you can highlight word on a kindle to look them up in dictionaries. However, when you highlight more than four words, there will be no option to look it up. Its not much of a problem in most languages, but happens to be a real pain when reading Japanese, as each character counts for a word. Is there anyway to look up more than 4 words at a times somehow (perhaps through jailbreaking)? I tried searching for this but there doesn't seem to be any existing discussion on this anywhere.

For more than 4 words, you can use Translate feature (if kindle is connected to internet). It is not clear to me why you’d expect a good dictionary result even with 3 or 4 words, as an arbitrary phrase is not likely to appear in a dictionary.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by tomsem

For more than 4 words, you can use Translate feature (if kindle is connected to internet). It is not clear to me why you’d expect a good dictionary result even with 3 or 4 words, as an arbitrary phrase is not likely to appear in a dictionary.

There are a lot of 2 word kindle English dictionary entries. The first post implies that Japanese has a lot of units more than 4 words (characters) long. Whether any dictionaries reflect that, I do not know. The question seems to be whether this is a dictionary deficiency or a software bug.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

There are a lot of 2 word kindle English dictionary entries. The first post implies that Japanese has a lot of units more than 4 words (characters) long. Whether any dictionaries reflect that, I do not know. The question seems to be whether this is a dictionary deficiency or a software bug.

The Lookup function has to have some reasonably finite cutoff for number of ‘words’.

But since Japanese mixes logographic and syllabic ‘words’, the rules are more complex.

I downloaded Japanese Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and JP-EN dictionary downloaded automatically (no, I cannot read Japanese - I took a few weeks of classes but it has been years and I never learned any kanji).

What it looks like is that selection tries to respect word boundaries.

For example I tried to select a single kanji character but it expanded to two of them, and then returned both a Dictionary and Translation result. It didn’t matter whether I selected the first or the second one.

Same is true of hiragana: if you choose one of the letters, it expands to include the entire word, and then returns dictionary result for that.

But some cases are ambiguous. For example I selected the ‘9 tipped to the left’ character and it seems that can mean ‘a field’ (Dictionary result) or ‘the’ (what Translation returned)

Translation seems to do very well with katakana: even spelled ‘Dudley’ and ‘Mr Dursley’ correctly. But of course Dictionary does not have entries for these foreign names.

Short selections of more than one word return both Dictionary and Translation results. Longer selections return ‘No result’ for Dictionary and a Translation result. Still longer selections return neither, but you can invoke Translation from the highlight menu (if online).

This seems pretty much like what happens with English.

It works well enough that I think I could read Harry Potter this way and maybe pick up some Japanese literacy, given a few thousand hours of effort.

Is the dictionary ‘deficient’? That is a judgement call, and I’m not qualified to make one. It seemed to return results for everything I selected, which is all I would hope for. Seems okay to me.

By contrast, I’ve gotten some terrible Russian translation dictionaries which could translate perhaps 1 in 4 words (not so great with ‘morphemes’). The one that comes with Kindle is a whole lot better than what I paid for. But without Translation, I’m not sure it would be enough. It’s good to use both.

Translation (‘powered by Bing’) is what you’d expect for a web translation. It is more or less useful, but not (yet) approaching human translation.