Incorporating Books You Read Physically Into LingQ

Hi friends,

What do you typically do for books you read physically? How do you incorporate them into LingQ?
For example, I’m doing my summer reading for a class I’m taking in the fall, and we have to read Conversación en la catedral by Mario Vargas Llosa. The book is super hard and there are TONS of words I don’t know on each page. What do you all recommend that I do? Should I type the words in and add them as LingQs? Should I not put it into LingQ at all? Should I ditch physical books forever and only LingQ books from now on?

Thanks in advance!

I would read another book!
if it is not fun, the I would move on…
I remember when I read that book, many years ago.
High school students read it to pretend to be deep intellectuals.
It was not fun. Actually I remember that it was very boring.
Cien años de soledad was more entertaining.
Love in the time of cholera? boring as hell.
Ok! you want to read it anyway. What I normally do is to type it words by words.
This is a lot of work.
Lately I thought that I could purchase a book, take it apart and converted to PDF.
I suspect this is the way to go.
Of course best is to have already in digital form.
Good luck!

Try and get hold of an electronic version to process through LingQ. I do most of my reading away from LingQ on my kindle and then review the chapters in LinqQ. Works for me.

I want to save up for a Kindle. I miss the feel and look of a good book, and the Kindle seems to have the look of a book without the glaring blue screen. Plus, one can use a dictionary along side, so that’s nice.

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Kindles are also great language learning tools. Both LingQ and kindles have the same end result: they make it possible to read books where there are more than 5% unknown words.

As recommended in this thread, I would look for a digital copy of the book, then import it here. There’s a Japanese book I’m reading now, a book about linguistics, that’s not currently available in the digital. As for that one, I’m painstakingly transcribing it into notepad, with the purpose of reading it on LingQ later.

Get the Paperwhite. The backlit screen is excellent and the multilanguage dictionary that I use, activated by touching a word on the screen, is very useful. I use it in a similar way to LingQ, but it is also somewhat different. With the Kindle, I concentrate on simply enjoying what I am reading and I look up words either when I need them or am just interested in them. With LingQ, I basically do mass vocabulary reviews, but with the words all in the context of the thing that I am reading. I still enjoy and understand the stuff that I read on LingQ.

Don’t try to type the entire book into LingQ. I am fairly certain you won’t get past the first page.

I don’t know how well OCR works with Japanese, but I’ve imported a lot of pages by scanning / using the OCR facility in my (now unfortunately previous) printer.

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Thank you for the tip. I tried it with an OCR app for the iPhone before but without any luck. An apparatus with a functioning OCR feature that works with Japanese - that’s something I could pay a hefty sum of money for.

I took apart a book and scanned it, made int into a PDF. Now my problem is to find a PDF to Word conversion for Polish! I think that Adobe Acrobat has a conversion but they want to charge for a annual subscription. I do not like those type of commitments to use a software.

Why all these troubles? Because the books that I want to read are not in digital form. I would love to read polish psychology books!

Yes, it’s a hassle alright. Hopefully - and most likely - the future will bring us more books in the digital form; even lesser known titles published in other languages than English.

I use an old version of Readiris for this purpose (Readiris HOME 12 PC). The old version was much cheaper (less than 15 Euros) than newer versions. It can handle 25 languages in the HOME edition including Polish.

I hope this helps.

I do not have it but I just found that Google Docs does OCR. I hope that it does it to Polish. I will try later today.

I was going to suggest Google Drive yesterday when I saw your post. I have used it for PDFs in Spanish. It only does first 10 PDF pages. According to this link Google Drive does support Polish: Convert PDF and photo files to text - Computer - Google Drive Help