Hey Steve,

I am getting to the point where I am increasingly interested in reading things that are not on the computer (i.e. books, magazines), but the LingQ method is not so easy when the things that I'm reading are not on the computer. Typing a whole book or magazine into LingQ would be highly impractical, but without LingQ looking up words takes a lot longer and I loose the integration that LingQ offers (i.e. words that I've already looked up before, words that I've never seen before, tracking my progress, etc.).

How is your approach to hard-copy texts similar to and/or different from your approach to electronic texts in LingQ? For example, do you underline and/or look up words as you read? Do you put parts of the text, or perhaps just a list of underlined words, into LingQ? (I would appreciate any of your thoughts pertaining to this topic, not limited to my example questions.)

I try to stay with LingQ until I am able to read books without too many unknown words. When I read away from LingQ I underline words and some phrases, but I rarely look them up or even add them to LingQ. Just too much work. I think the act of reading and underlining helps me. I try to choose books that interest me and where the vocabulary is not to far ahead of my level.

Hi,

I always choose books where the vocabulary is not too far ahead of my level. I'm relieved to know that I'm doing the right thing though.
My problem was that I got bored reading child books. Recently I came across "Good Reads". Their purpose of the program is to help adults become more literate. In this program, Canadian authors who write popular adult novels are asked to write short stories or short novels at a lower language level.
It's awesome. I enjoy the lecture so much !

Unfortunately there're no audiobooks available. Some of the authors however are reading the first chapter on the website.

Hey Bettina, can you give me a link where I can find some of the books you mentioned here ? I'd like to know more about this program, it could certainly help me. Thanks.

You need to use some sort of learning aid such as portable dictionaries so that looking up words does not take up too much of your time. When I do not look up words, I feel that I am losing something worthwhile in the plot. Everyone is different when it comes to looking up words, but I have to look them up even though it will slow down my reading speed etc

Perhaps Bettina means http://www.goodreads.com/? I like this site too.

Many ebook readers have dictionaries built in, which really helps with reading books. Or you can read books that you have already read in your native language. That way when you meet an unfamiliar word you have at least some idea of what it means.

That is a good site, Helen. She probably meant this one, however: http://abclifeliteracy.ca/goodreads .

Thanks, I will see both.

This site also deserves an honourable mention: http://lexile.com/.

It doesn't offer books (just links to online bookshops). It analyses a huge number of books (from Barnes and Noble and the World Books Catalogue) and decides what reading level they are at (the lexile measure for the book). If you can work out your reading level (the lexile measure for you, the reader) then the site will tell you, for any particular book, how hard it will be for you to read. Once you have read the book, if you liked it, the site can make recommendations for similar books at the same reading level or maybe a little bit easier or harder, depending how easy or hard you like your reading experience to be.

It only operates in the English and Spanish languages. I use it to help me choose Russian books, but I have to assume that the Russian language version is at the same reading level as the English language version (I don't know how fair an assumption that is).

Steve, you sometimes mention in your videos that you usually listen to books as well as read them. Do you usually look for audio books first and then find the corresponding hard copy? I started a history book, for example, (Kleine Deutsche Geschichte, by Hagen Schulze) but I can find no audio version of it. Do you think it is worth trying to find books that have audio and ebook so that you can use LingQ or do you think it is better just to read whatever you are interested in and have the chance to even if it means there is no audio/ebook? I am somewhat torn between... On the one hand, audio input would be very good to have. On the other hand, limiting my search for interesting books to ones that have an audio counter part seems somewhat constricting (more so in non-fiction than fiction, but I tend to be more interested in non-fiction). Do you have any thoughts one resolving this tension?

If you only have either the book or the audio, use what you have. Any source is better than none. One of the advantages of book+audio is that you can listen while you read. You can also import it to LingQ if you want. As long as you have the digitized text, it's possible to import that as well, and use the LingQ tools as much as you want.

If you can't find the matching audio (or text), it's not the end of the world.

There are Scan service Websites we can ask to scan our favorite books, so we can get digitized texts in order to import them to LingQ. Scanning one 300 pages book costs about 2$, not so expensive. I am going to use this site if necessary.

this is a pretty good site to read books online: http://www.onread.com/

i use it all the time and there are lots of books there.

Another question... I just starting looking into ebooks more. Is there an easier way to import an ebook into LingQ than to copy-paste page by page, or is that pretty much the way to do it?

I have tended to stay with books that are out of copyright where I can find the text on the internet and import them. There was no shortage in Russian and Czech.

It is easier to copy the entire text of ebooks if you open the epub file in "Sigil" a free e-book eidtor software. Text files and word files of course are simple copy of the entire section or chapter of the file and paste into the import window. Pdf's sometimes need to be converted with an OCR for which you may need the actual Adobe Acrobat instead of just the acrobat reader. After they are machine readable, you can pretty well copy multiple pages by holding down the shift key in between the first and second mouse click. Depending on the quality of the OCR read, you may need to edit a little.

Ỳou may also want to`check how line breaks are handled. I have e-books where words are hyphenated at the end of lines, in an encoding that LingQ doesn't recognise so words are split into two meaningless halves. I like to put the text of e-books into Microsoft Word so I can do a global find and replace if needed.