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Kindle Reading (PatrickWilken or others) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5043 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 9 of 16 29 June 2015 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't use the kindle fire tablet. I use the dedicated e-ink reader. Mainly because of battery life and lack of eyestrain. I follow Ogrim's strategy almost exactly. I do highlight words and look at them afterwards. Haitian Creole has no monolingual nor bilingual kindle dictionary. I have to make ebooks myself with Calibre for Haitian. I use the Kindle 4 without touchscreen or built in backlight. For $40 on ebay its some of the best money I ever spent for language learning and just reading in general.
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| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4988 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 16 29 June 2015 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have the old Kindle with the keyboard and it doesn't have the vocabulary builder feature. My strategy is like most of my language learning strategies: I doubt it's the best one possible but it's simple and it gives me results for relatively little effort.
I look up most words that I don't know, and often also ones that I recognise but I'm not 100% sure about. After I look up a word, I decide whether it's important enough to merit further study or it's not common/useful enough (which I realise is an inexact science especially in a language you're learning) and highlight the phrase/sentence/paragraph if I do think so. Sooner or later (usually later in my case, I have a backlog of about ten books at the moment...) I come back to my list of highlights and make some Anki cards. These days as my level gets more advanced, I find myself highlighting fewer unknown words (there are still lots in most books, but mainly "unimportant" ones), and more of my highlights are things like interesting usages of known words or constructions/expressions that would be useful for conversations. This would work a lot better if I could find a decent Italian/English dictionary. I could highlight a word that's not in the dictionary and look it up later, but in practice I usually can't be bothered. The French/English one is quite good at least. Edited by garyb on 29 June 2015 at 3:58pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5009 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 11 of 16 29 June 2015 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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My procedure is different from most--I make no claim that this is the most efficient, but it's the one I enjoy. With Spanish novels, I have a Spanish dictionary app, so I can look up words as I need to. If I don't know the word, I highlight it and continue reading. Periodically, when I have some time, I go through and make flashcards for the highlighted vocabulary.
The disadvantage of this is, of course, it slows down the reading. Maybe to such an extent that it's no longer enjoyable. (I still enjoy it, but that's me.) But the advantage is that, once a word has been committed to a flashcard, it'll be retained in my mind in the future and I won't have to stop to look it up again, should I come across it elsewhere. So moving through a book is usually difficult at first, as one sees lots of new vocabulary. Different authors have different lexica, and it takes time to get used to. Especially when the language is pluricentric, like Latin American Spanish. But as all that vocabulary becomes engrained in flashcards, the rest of the book starts to move more swiftly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4314 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 12 of 16 02 July 2015 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | ||
Woops, sorry for the long delay in replying. <3-month-old babies are distracting. :) If you want to create Anki cards from books as you read I would strongly recommend Readlang and a tablet/pc. I've used this a bit with books and you can very easily generate 1000s of useful cards from a novel and effortlessly import them into Anki. I find this a lot better than generating cards from the Kindle. I created cards from text I read for about a year, and then I got sick of SRS and started just looking up words on the fly as I went, without bothering to note anything down. My impression is that this works almost as well for me to learn words and allows me to lose myself in the text. Words that are important tend to repeat and you fairly quickly get their sense. After about two years I found I could use the free monolingual Duden with the Kindle and then a bit later I basically stopped having to use a dictionary very much at all. Though I still like using ebooks so I can look up the occasional word. I recently started reading the daily Suddeutsch Zeitung, which you can get as an app for phones or tablets and costs 20 euros/month (though if you grab some of the various free apps for newspapers out there (Zeit, SZ.net, FZ, Speigel, FOCUS Online) you'll have more free German text updated daily than you could possibly read. I find newspapers really helpful for building up my broad vocabulary (as well as of course learning a lot about German culture/history/politics), but as dictionary lookups are a bit of a hassle (you can do this via linking to another app like Google Translate) I am not sure how useful they are until your vocabulary is more advanced. WRT to Kindles: I have looked around and really like the old e-ink 6 inch models with a cursor. They are no longer made, but should be readily available via Ebay. The newer touchscreen models make it much much slower to look up words. They are fine for the occasional lookup, but if you are weaker in a language then I would find it too frustrating to continually look up words. In this all that is new and shiny is not always the best. When using Kindles I always use the free ebook management software Calibre (think iTunes for books), that allows amongst other things conversion to various ebook formats and allows you to easily strip off the DRM from books from Amazon so you can read them on other devices. Edited by patrickwilken on 02 July 2015 at 10:54pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aokoye Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5322 days ago 235 posts - 453 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese | Message 13 of 16 11 July 2015 at 5:43pm | IP Logged | ||
Are you going to be reading primarily kindle books? If not I'm sure there are Android reading apps that save what words you've looked up. I'm too tired to look into it now but I'll try to remember to do so later today. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6378 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 14 of 16 11 July 2015 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | ||
Could you expand on why the cursor is better? I say that as someone who recently hated touchscreens with passion and who still refuses to get a smartphone ;D By now I have an e-reader and an mp3 player with touchscreen, and i'm looking into getting a convertible Windows 8 laptop. I still hate typing on touchscreen but it's nice for scrolling/reading. How can it be easier to have to move the cursor throughout the page instead of clicking only the words you need to click? Or do you simply mean that touchscreen Kindles are slower? This wouldn't surprise me; perhaps going for another brand might be better. My dad is very much satisfied with his PocketBook, for example. He's still working on his English, heh. (Initially he got me a PocketBook too, but it's much better for reading one book at a time than switching between several, so after 1.5 years I got an Onyx Cleopatra) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4314 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 15 of 16 12 July 2015 at 10:07am | IP Logged | ||
I think the cursor models are much better when you need to look up lots of words per page. The dictionary definition appears in a small box at the top/bottom of the screen, and doesn't obscure the text you are reading. The touch screen models put a big definition box directly over the sentence you are reading, so you can't just glace quickly at the definition and keep reading (i.e., you have to touch the screen again to get rid of the definition, and then wait until the definition goes away). Also the definition seems to take significantly longer to load. With the cursor model I would just run the cursor down line-by-line, rather than word-by-word, and just quickly jump to any words I don't know. We are probably only talking about fractions of seconds, but the difference is enough for the touchscreen models to really pull me out the text, which didn't happen for the cursor models. I only have experience with Kindles so I don't know if this is true for other ebook readers. As I said though it's a matter for how many words you are looking up. I recently started reading the daily German newspaper Suddeutsch Zeitung, which doesn't come in a Kindle format (so I was forced to read it on the phone, which I am really enjoying - so much that I am thinking of buying a tablet sometime to read it). This works for me as I don't look up many words now (perhaps 1 or 2 per article). So at this point I think I would be quite happy with a touchscreen Kindle for German novels too, but it's taken me 2-3 years to get there. Edited by patrickwilken on 12 July 2015 at 10:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3637 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto | Message 16 of 16 12 July 2015 at 10:38am | IP Logged | ||
There is also that shiny new readlang feature which allows you to have the definition show above the word rather than replace it, which I much prefer and which should help with the flow of reading and repeated words. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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