Hi all!
I bought a few Kindle books. They are nonfiction ones, and I did it mostly because of the sake of reading them. However, I am interested in how I can improve my English through them, except from highlighting the words, making flashcards on Anki and stuff like that. Can I somehow make just the process of improving in the language more meaningful, immersive, fun, and effective?
I made a resolution to go past lower advanced level of English, to more proficient one, if not completely proficient. I just feel that I want to achieve this thing. I would benefit a lot from it.
Also, I am kind of bummed that those books don’t have audio versions.
I am also interested in how I can connect reading these books with LingQ.
I personally found learning through a Kindle too slow. I also have the Paperwhite, so it’s not like an iPad, but it emulates the look of a real book.
I found reading easier books on a Kindle rewarding, because of the low techness of it. It meant me not using the dictionary as a crutch because of how slow it would load, so I would have to rely on intuition.
I thought it would be cool one of these days if Amazon teamed up with LingQ so LingQ could have its own platform on a Kindle. I thought that would be neat. Cross platform capabilities; all your LingQs are now on your e-books. Imagine that!
Kindle works great for me. I’m learning Dutch and the dictionary interface works fine, especially for individual words, and I can always go into the dictionaries themselves to look up more complex words and phrases.
As I mentioned on another post, when I come across turns of phrase in my reading (or listening), once I grasp the grammar of the phrase, I search various forms of the phrase — always using quotation marks — on Google (or Google News or Google Books) and end up opening up a whole world of interesting online content, namely blogs and discussion forums, that I would otherwise have never known anything about. Which inevitably leads to more phrases and expressions I would not have come across by just reading books.
I also find it useful sometimes to search words or phrases on Twitter Search. That way I can see lots of examples of how a word or turn of phrase is being used (or in some cases not used!) in what counts as everyday speech.
There also used to be this fantastic website called TOLX where you could search Dutch words and phrases and it would find videos from several different Dutch television websites (which contain countless videos) where that word or phrase was used. It worked by interfacing not only with the title of the video but with the subtitles, which weren’t always 100 percent accurate, but what an amazing tool! You could find not only Dutch videos with Dutch subtitles —but those which contained a particular spoken word or phrase. Talk about bummed! I was really bummed when that website went to the wayside. TOLX zoekmachine, please come back! If you could find something like that in English (or any language for that matter) that would be truly amazing!
I only read foreign language books in LingQ. See this article to explain how to do it https://lingqcentral-en.lingq.com/how-to-import-and-study-ebooks-on-lingq/. I just find that reading on Kindle saving words, exporting etc… is just too slow and I won’t do it. Whereas reading on LingQ is totally painless. Of course, once you have done the work of extracting and importing the text.
It would be great to have some way of integrating Kindle books into LingQ. We have often thought that ourselves. We should reach out to them!
I don’t see why there would be a problem for people to read purchased ebooks privately on Lingq. If anything it would absolutely boost my spending on amazon e-books.
I’ve been using a particular method combining Kindle and LingQ. I read a chunk of text on the Kindle first – this can be a paragraph, a page, or a chapter depending on where you are in the language, this first Kindle pass is just reading and trying to understand the text without looking up any words. Then I will go through the same chunk of text on Lingq, aiming at really just looking at yellow and blue words and lingqing and marking as needed. Then I go back to Kindle and read the next chunk.
I feel like this method combines the best of both words for me. Not having an intermediate quick translate on the first pass forces me to try to use the context more, then the LingQ pass gives me anything I may have missed.
As your vocab builds you’ll read longer and longer stretches unassisted on the Kindle, then you can fly through the same long stretches of text on LingQ by using the arrow keys to jump to blue and yellow words only.
Anyone using Chromebook Pixel? Calibre doesn’t appear to work with Chrome OS. My Pixel also allows Android Apps but I didn’t see anything. I need a conversion method.
This has to be readable as well. How can we retain formatting or set formatting as we would like? Getting a large chunk of unformatted text is very difficult to read. Need page breaks, paragraphs, white space, text style and font size.
I buy Kindle Books only after I find the same edition in Audible so I have audio as well. Audible has quite a large selection of books that I’m interested in. You might want to give it a go.
I don’t have Kindle, but on Android I use Moon+ Reader Pro and GoldenDict Free. The dictionary app integrates seamlessly with the reader and works with a large number of dictionaries that can be found on the Internet. I use the Babylon Russian-English dictionary. I think it can also integrate with Google Translate. (I learned about those apps in these forums some time ago and am repeating the info for anyone who didn’t see it and might find it useful.)
This worked well when I was on vacation last week with no wifi and limited charging capabilities – I saved on mobile data usage and battery since the reader and dictionary are local whereas the Lingq app needs to constantly talk with the mother ship. Kindle et al. would have the same advantages.
