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IPad vs. Kindle | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5419 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 41 of 67 19 April 2011 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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One thing I meant to stress in my last post and forgot is how perfect iPad is for studying classical languages like Latin and Greek. You can find all the books you'll ever need for free PDF on Google Books--grammars, readers, unadapted texts, many of which are great but out of print. I tried very hard to use the Kindle for these languages and it was just too tedious.
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6568 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 42 of 67 19 April 2011 at 7:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yesterday I downloaded an app called TransReader for my iPad. It uses Google Translate to make
automatic bilingual books. I don't have access to my computer until Thursday, so I have't been able to try it out yet, but it looks promising. That's something the Kindle can't do. There's also RosettaReader that does select->translate for webpages. Pretty much like a popup dictionary. But a PDF reader with such simple functionality is yet to be found. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aabram Pentaglot Senior Member Estonia Joined 5519 days ago 138 posts - 263 votes Speaks: Estonian*, English, Spanish, Russian, Finnish Studies: Mandarin, French | Message 43 of 67 22 April 2011 at 11:10am | IP Logged | ||
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I thought I'd post my update on Kindle vs iPad topic. Despite what I stated few weeks
back I did make decision to purchace iPad when prices for iPad dropped in the wake of arriving iPad2. 16GB WiFi version was now cheap enough for me so that's what I bought. I've been using iPad for 2 weeks now and have moved some of my library over to iPad. I've had a chance to compare Kindle3 and iPad for my purposes. Not surprisingly my former opinion still stands. iPad is nice for all kinds of stuff. I bought Pleco dicionary + hwr for it and it rocks. Reading PDFs is superior experience to anything. Dictonary support is of course much better on iPad, but setting up popup dictionary for lookup while reading with iBooks is way easier on Kindle, unless I'm missing some obvious trick for iPad. Apparently I'd need to jailbreak it to be able to muck around with needed files. Not acceptable. There's an app called Tap-translate which is supposed to work in Safari, but lots of people are reporting problems with it so I haven't tried it yet. For PDFs I take my iPad, for random quick dictionary lookups I usually grab my Android phone instead since it's way quicker and more convenient and for pure reading I still take Kindle. Last week I went for a trip for few days and I spent in airports and on airplanes more time than iPad 10h battery would've given me. It would not be cool to have your book run out of juice while you're stuck in the airport. Kindle battery indicator took just a small dent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6568 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 44 of 67 22 April 2011 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can update my post on TransReader, too. It doesn't work very well. I tried it with a Three Musketeers
ebook in French and the translation was bad and often cut itself short in the middle of sentences only to skip back and repeat the last few paragraphs. Very annoying. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5248 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 45 of 67 22 April 2011 at 1:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I love my Kindle for reading. The dictionaries I have for my languages, Spanish and Portuguese are fantastic! I use monolingual dictionaries, Larousse for Spanish and the new Priberam for Portuguese. Both have well over 100,000 entries and deal well with conjugations and relatively obscure words. For me, I find it better to use monolingual dictionaries rather than bilingual dictionaries for my language study. PDF's aren't handled as well by the device either, though some can be converted and others can be read quite well in landscape provided the pdf is formatted simply.
The Kindle is designed for reading it isn't a portable computer. Web surfing is clunky. Although I do use it for listening and reading, the interface for mp3 is clunky as well. I use it for one audio-book at a time and it handles it well as long as the chapters are short. If you stop listening 15 minutes into a chapter that is 30 minutes long and turn your Kindle off, it loses your place in the audio and restarts the audio from the beginning of the chapter with no way to fast forward. I love that I can read in bright sunlight, hmmm, I live in the Caribbean- it's nice to get out and enjoy the outdoors here. I can sit by the beach and read and learn at the same time- the more sunlight the better for Kindle. Getting outdoors is a huge part of why I live here. I love the super long battery life. I love "Calibre"- the program that helps you download blogs, newspapers, magazines and convert almost any text into most ebook formats. The Kindle is not meant to be a competitor to the iPad. It is an electronic reading device with some pretty cool features and it costs about a third of what the iPad costs. You can use it for language learning in many ways but not every way that you can with a computing device. There are work-arounds but they can be inconvenient and clunky. If someone gave me an iPad, I sure wouldn't refuse. If I could afford it, I'd buy both! Edited by iguanamon on 22 April 2011 at 2:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6929 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 46 of 67 02 June 2011 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||
Post #37 at this link lists the dictionaries installed on Sony readers to be: "Assuming that all the Sony PRS-n50 dictionaries are the same, the complete list is: 1. New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition © 2005 Oxford University Press, Inc. 2. Oxford Dictionary of English, Second Edition, Revised © 2005 Oxford University Press 3. Oxford-Hachette French Dictionary (EN-FR), fourth edition © Oxford University Press and Hachette Livre 2007 4. Oxford-Hachette French Dictionary (FR-EN), fourth edition © Oxford University Press and Hachette Livre 2007 5. Oxford Spanish Dictionary (EN-SP), fourth edition © Oxford University Press 2008 6. Oxford Spanish Dictionary (SP-EN), fourth edition © Oxford University Press 2008 7. Collins English-German Dictionary - Complete and Unabridged, 7th edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2007, including matching German Lemmatized Lists (German and English) © HarperCollins Publishers 2010 8. Collins German-English Dictionary - Complete and Unabridged, 7th edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2007, including matching German Lemmatized Lists (German and English) © HarperCollins Publishers 2010 9. Collins English-Italian Dictionary, 2nd Edition 2005 © HarperCollins Publishers 1995, 2005, including matching Italian Lemmatized Lists (Italian and English) © HarperCollins Publishers 2010 10. Collins Italian-English Dictionary, 2nd Edition 2005 © HarperCollins Publishers 1995, 2005, including matching Italian Lemmatized Lists (Italian and English) © HarperCollins Publishers 2010 11. Van Dale Pocketwoordenboek Engels-Nederlands, © 2009 Van Dale Uigevers, Utrecht/Antwerpen Alle rechten voorbehouden/All rights reserved 12. Van Dale Pocketwoordenboek Nederlands-Engels, © 2009 Van Dale Uigevers, Utrecht/Antwerpen Alle rechten voorbehouden/All rights reserved" Edited by frenkeld on 02 June 2011 at 4:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6905 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 47 of 67 02 June 2011 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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It depends on what you are going to do with it.
I have an ipod touch and a Kindle DX (large 9.7 screen that supports PDF files) and I love them both: Link to picture of Kindle DX Graphite I purchased the DX because I have over 800 language books in pdf format and because it is easy to purchase books from Amazon and they are sent wirelessly to the device. The Kindle will last up to 14 days without a recharge and you can read it in the sunlight. However, the ipod touch/ipad will let you download applications and watch youtube videos, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4895 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 48 of 67 21 August 2011 at 2:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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I got a kindle for my birthday a couple of months ago, and I love it. I got it because my shelves are overflowing, and because I don't like reading for long on a regular computer screen. I must be clear that I bought it for reading books, not for language learning.
One nice feature is the ability to download a substantial sample of any kindle book sold on Amazon. I have tried out several language books in this way, and I have to agree that if there are many tables in the book, it will not work very well. Publishers can format things differently, but most publishers are lazy when it comes to ebooks. I have found it useful for reading pdf's from frenchpod101, although if I convert them they don't work very well. I just send the unconverted pdf's to the kindle, and read them in landscape, which is just about the right side. The pdf from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/French works well too, although the sound links don't work. What I would really like for a kindle would be the ability to put texts up in parallel. And, of course, better foreign language dictionaries. I couldn't afford an iPad, otherwise I think it would be a great language support tool. However, for reading for long periods of time, you can't beat an ebook reader with e-ink. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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