Studying Japanese with a Kindle?

5 comments

1. It’s wonderful. I could sit at my computer and read a novel with yomichan for maybe 30 minutes at a time, but with the Kindle and JMdict, I can go to a café and read for hours. It’s easy on the eyes, easy to carry, and with a little work, you can download anything from syosetu and put it on your kindle.

2. I have a Kindle paperwhite and I personally didn’t enjoy using it for Japanese. I found it too slow or cumbersome to look up words, so I reserve it for English reading and use my phone or tablet for Japanese. Characters, pictures etc are clear though in black and white. My biggest issue was just how slow the UI was. Can’t speak for how good it is for manga, though, or other kindle types

3. I like it! I can read more at a lower price, also, it’s easier to find the words in the dictionary

4. if you suck at japanese and want/need to lookup word definitions a lot then do not get the kindle. there are other e-readers that are better

5. I bought a Kobo Sage recently and couldn’t be happier with it. I read tons in Japanese and English on it, find the Japanese dictionary to be totally fine, but usually use my phone to search a word since I can add to anki that way. I read both novels as ebooks and manga as PDF files (no dictionary on those, but it doesn’t bother me).