I made the discovery like 4 months ago: Kindle is an excellent tool to learn many languages. All you do is tap a word you don’t know and…bam, translated. There are two ways to do this, buy a kindle integrated dictionary (the best way) or be connected to Wi-Fi to use the internet to translate (not so dependable, it usually only gives a one word translation which may not inspire confidence) Here are languages that I know have kindle integrated dictionaries:
Japanese
Dutch
German
French
Spanish
Latin
There are great books that have side by side bilingual paragraphs, or have the translation side by side with each word, or just make the language really easy for intermediates or those folks that are just so enthusiastic about reading the target language but cannot stand super freaking long explanations of lexicon. These languages which are so blessed are:
Russian
Greek
Hebrew
and…Chinese?
Here’s where I vent my frustration. There are certain languages which I have found very frustrating to gather resources on, this is keeping in count that I am already profoundly flabbergasted that Dutch and Latin have more resources than Chinese and Russian. Come on! Chinese and Russian are in the top 4 list and Dutch would barely make any top 10. If coding is a problem with Hanzi or Cyrillic then why is Japanese not a problem? It gets worse, too. The next list is of languages that I am desperately trying to find anything at all on.
Ancient Sumerian
Ancient Accadian
Ancient Egyptian
Sanscrit
No, I’m not trying to “learn them all” I would in all honesty learn Ancient Sumerian to fluency if I could find just one crummy book on it…it’s the world’s oldest written language, we have warehouses of truckloads of cuneiform text, a good understanding of grammar and a massive database on their words. I skip Latin, I only dabble in Greek, but I would bathe in Egyptian or Sumerian. I have found that there are a number of cognates with English or whatever modern day language. Gee, isn’t that weird for language isolates? Studying Egyptian and Sumerian I find lots of stuff that flips my entire understanding of language and history. There must be some kind of conspiracy because language is everything. The communist party doesn’t want us broadcasting “Mao’s a mass murderer” out to the People’s Rupublic, so therefore ignorance and censorship is propagated. I find that the vast majority of people here don’t have the shallowest understanding of the conflict in Syria or Ukraine, not even the Ukrainians themselves (свобода партія are literal nazis, if you don’t know who they are then don’t even open your mouth on the subject). We’ve ignited world wars for stupider reasons. Why are the very few Americans that do even have the slightest care of outside cultures mostly only cling to European Union types? And worst of all, we’ve been betrayed by our closest allies, the mostly European Union types, WHY IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT THE AIIB ???
Sorry, did not mean to go off into that tangent. Please add to my list or make suggestions. Is there a different kind of electronic book that would satisfy seekers of other languages better?