So currently I don’t read as much as I used to and my Japanese hasn’t improved that much once I got to the point where normal conversations were easy. I’ve had girlfriends where we only spoke Japanese, no issues only speaking Japanese all day, but I still would have trouble reading Harry Potter in Japanese if that makes sense. Novels especially kill me. Non-fiction is a bit better. I was able to grind through Steve Job’s biography, but not Harry Potter.
It’s not even kanji, it’s just a lot of uncommon words and phrases, and random tacked on grammatical endings or sounds that I don’t know.
So I noticed on the kindle app on my phone there is a Japanese > Japanese dictionary, and also Japanese > English and also Bing translate if the dictionary doesn’t have a listing and you want to roll the dice on a translator. Also you can save highlights.
Kindle Unlimited is pretty cheap, so it seems like that would be perfect for trying to find books to match my reading level.
I have a hard time focusing on reading with my phone which is why I want to try a stand-alone kindle. No Instagram, Reddit, etc.
So my questions:
– Does the physical kindle (paper white or front light) have all these dictionary + highlight features?
– And is there anywhere where I can buy one with a 図書カード ? Because I have a lot of money on these from my last job. My work gave these out faster than I could possibly consume books, so I ended up with about 4万円 worth. My kid has a lot of books but I still have money left over.
Curious if anyone else is doing this to improve reading skills.
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u/Inexperiencedblaster
You read more than me, have you tried this?
The physical kindle has dictionaries installed by default (and you can add more or update them if necessary). If you’re online it will look up the word in Wikipedia as well as do some rudimentary translation to other languages.
There are also tools to take the words you looked up or highlighted and convert them to Anki cards if you’re into that.
Kindle e-reader had excellent support for Japanese. Not sure how it compared to iOS Kindle, but the Android Kindle Japanese support for dictionary lookup is pretty poor. The highlight is also there, but it’s only single colour since the device can only show black and white.
Kobo reader, despite being owned by Rakuten, can’t match Kindle for Japanese dictionary.
Also go for Paperwhite over the basic model if you can afford it.
I have an Oasis and use it for Japanese reading. I really like it.
I’ve found that the physical standlone kindles are not great if you want to look anything up very often. The touch, hold, and drag is slow/inaccurate, the dictionary lookup is slow, and whether the word/specific conjugation used can actually be parsed by the installed dictionary is hit-or-miss. Honestly, I think it’s a mess, but I look words up maybe once every two or three pages. If it were less often, it wouldn’t be an issue (I enjoyed reading in English with it), so this could very well be just as much of a “me” problem as a device problem.
I later switched to using the Windows Kindle App, thinking I could just use [jisho.org](https://jisho.org), but this was also a no-go because if you copy something within the Windows Desktop App, it adds a bunch of bullshit text (book name, page# etc) to the copied text AND adds spaces to the words to… try and prevent copyright infringment? I have no clue. To top it off, you can’t install additional dictionaries, so this was also a no-go.
And if you say well why don’t you use the Web-Based Cloud Reader? Well it seems that the cloud reader doesn’t “support” all books, and when I say “all books,” I mean every single Japanese book I own.
The “best” of the options ended up reading on the iPad mini using the iOS Kindle App. It’s heavier than a paperwhite, obviously more expensive, and might not be right for you since you say you don’t want the distraction of the Internet on it, but sadly coming into it with the same goal as you, this was my conclusion.
You could go this route (or use a cheaper android/iOS tablet), and just not install any other apps. And yes, to answer your other question, yes, it absolutely helps your reading skills.
Good luck.
I got a paperwhite and super happy with it. Sideloaded a few J-J dictionaries into it. Fantasy and sci fi are probably the hardest genres to go for. Anyone who’s given Dune a crack in Japanese could probably tell you the same.
I love reading on Japanese on my first gen Kindle Oasis. The lookup is just slow enough that it encourages you to actually remember the darn words!
I’m serious, I’ve noticed that if it’s too easy to look up, I’ll remember a word less well than otherwise.
If you want to start up fairly easy, I recommend the novelization of Your Name.
And to go a bit more hardcore the Japanese version of The Martian is pretty good – and still fairly easy to read because of the narrator’s style. Harry Potter and The Hobbit are also fairly easy to read in Japanese in my opinion. Heck even the Lord of the Rings isn’t that bad, weirdly enough (but the Japanese version of the Farseer books by Robin Hobb is insanely hard).
Harder would be things like All You Need Is Kill, but then you’ll be learning military ranks and all sorts of army linguo in Japanese, which is fun in its own right!
And getting to the very difficult there’s things like Shika no Ou, which is really, really hard (imo)
I hear great things about the Paperwhite, but I hope you found a useful answer.
Your Japanese is much better than mine!
Question to kindle owners : how’s the 読み方 support on Kindle? Not just for me but maybe for my kids.