Chinese Character Support on Kindle

[gato]

VAT (a kind of sales tax) is 17% in China. That makes up most of the difference.

[fanglu]

I'm planning on buying a kindle, but still tossing up between the paperwhite and the standard model. I've seen both running, but only with English, not Chinese, material. Does the lower resolution of the standard kindle make it hard to read Chinese? The fact that amazon.cn only seems to sell the paperwhite makes me a bit wary of buying the non-paperwhite model.

[sburkle]

Just get the paperwhite, it's a great device. However, if you don't mind the basic non-touch Kindle it displays Chinese just fine. My girlfriend has one and reads Chinese exclusively on it.

[fanglu]

Thanks!

[icebear]

Just wanted to add a few suggestions for using Kindle as a Chinese reader, based on my very gradually improving habits:

• Model - As I and others have noted above, Paperwhite model is suggested - my feeling is that its reading technology is superior than alternatives (e.g. iPad), and the touch screen makes it decent at selecting/saving words and phrases for later.
• Dictionary - Installing a free Chinese-English dictionary is relatively easy, and once installed works similar to those on Pleco - click a word and it looks it up. I actually prefer that looking up a word is less than instantaneous (taking a full second or so) because it forces me to rely less on popup and more on inferring, along with selecting better level appropriate text.
• OS - Installing a C-E dictionary on the operating system is superior to going the Duokan OS route, in my opinion, because as we are all aware every slight hindrance can help break your good habit from developing. Having all your English and Chinese reading under one roof helps.
• Segmentation/Syncing - I do run into a segmentation issue in the default Kindle OS occasionally, which is never a problem in Duokan. As far I as I can tell, the issue arises whenever I send Chinese text to the Kindle via USB - with the result being that the Kindle either tries to use the wrong dictionary (English) or will only look up single characters at a time. If I instead use the Kindle email address (attaching a .txt or .mobi) or the Kindle Chrome plugin (which sends web pages/articles/selected text), the resulting file will look up multi-character words too, with pretty decent segmentation. I assume this means some processing is going on at Amazon to sort that out. Using the @kindle.com or plugin to sync is recommended as it makes looking up words far easier.
• Library habits - as mentioned above, once you get in the habit of using your @kindle.com or the Chrome plugin it is very easy to generate a good library of material. There are plenty of pulpy/easy reading texts available for free online, and endless articles.
  • I normally have a few dozen articles synced at any one time, which I select simply by using the Chrome plugin on any news article that looks interesting to me. Every few days I delete them all - including the unread. Purpose here is to always have something, anything, to occupy 10-30 minutes of Chinese reading when the mood strikes me, rather than having to search it out.
  • I also normally have 1 novel at a time downloaded - usually very easy to find .txt files on Baidu for whatever you are looking for. I try to read at least 30 minutes a day of whichever novel I'm on, although this is unfortunately highly variable for me. I've gotten in the habit of reading the very good Pathlight quarterly, which offers English translations of a chapter or so from well known Chinese authors. In addition to being worth the read because the selections are interesting and generally well translated, Pathlight is also is a good way to learn about books I'm probably interested in - sampling a chapter quickly in English is more efficient/accurate than clodding around Chinese book sites and going through several false starts.

[tysond]

I just bought a Kindle Paperwhite from Amazon.cn, 899元.   I've owned many other kindles and this is super nice especially the lighting of the screen which I think would be very useful.  

 

It comes ready to setup in many different languages, including Simplified Chinese, which I chose.

It then comes with 3 dictionaries - C-C, C-E, E-C.   

 

The C-C dictionary seems quite good, and includes pinyin for words and characters.

The C-E dictionary seems quite good too, with example sentences, but no pinyin for words, only characters.

I need word level pinyin and am not quite to go fully C-C for new words, so I installed the CC-CEDIT.mobi file from this thread.

I emailed it to my @kindle.cn account, but that was going slow, so then I copied it over USB into the documents directory.

Eventually it's installed twice, so it seems either method works and it is recognized as a dictionary.

 

What seems to be a new feature is that words that you lookup are put into a list.  You can delete, mark at memorized, browse the whole list, or flashcard against this list, and the context of the word is saved as well (the sentence it came from).  So the flashcards have the word and then the sentence it came from on the front, and the definition on the back.  With some SQL magic some people have extracted the vocab database from the Kindle, but it's not trivial.  It would be nice if it prioritized by how many times you look the same thing up.  The saving words to a list feature can be disabled.

 

I'll use it for a few weeks and see how I feel about it. 

[roddy]

So the Paperwhite has a built in flashcard function? That sounds potentially very useful, how good is it to actually use?

[icebear]

Thanks for this update Tysond - I haven't updated my firmware since purchasing last year, what you mention about saving word lists is pretty interesting and I'll have to look into that if there is some way to extract later. Even unsorted the list would be useful - either comparing against a frequency list, or just thumb in the wind "I don't seem to recall that one".

[ouyangjun]

I've been a kindle user for years, but my kindle account is registered on amazon.com in the US.  I normally download e-books and send them to my kindle, but this is always a bit of a pain (to find the book I want, in the format I want, with good quality).  I've lately been looking for a better site for downloading e-books (and I'm willing to pay for each one).

 

I looked at the amazon.cn site, and it looks like they have a lot of books.  I'm wondering what the current suggestions are on ebook resources in Chinese.  I've been thinking of buying a second Kindle and registering it to the amazon.cn store.  Doing this would mean I'd have two Kindles (one registered to the US store and one to the Chinese), not ideal, but from the research I've been doing this may be the easiest.  

 

Thoughts on the Amazon Kindle China store for ebooks?  

[gato]

I don't think you don't need 2 kindles to use 2 Amazon accounts. Even when you can log out of one Amazon account, your Kindle books will remain intact. So you can log out of one account and onto another if you need to buy books from both the US and China Amazon Kindle stores. By the way, I believe this only works on physical Kindles. On smartphone/tablet/PC versions of Kindle, your Kindle books from the first account disappear once you log on to a second account.

What kind of books do you read? If you read mostly classics, there are quite a few 盗版 sites for mobi books that you can transfer onto your Kindle. But, of course, I would encourage you to buy legit copies to keep our starving writers and publishers alive.

[tysond]

Regarding the flashcards - the feature is called Vocabulary Builder.   There's a description here, be sure to click on "Show Me".  

 

How good is it to use?   Very version 1.0 at the moment.  Similar to about 1000 apps out there.

It's nowhere near as good as Pleco's reader even in terms of word list management.  

The only real value to me is auto-populating a list with words + context + definitions.

That said, it's nice that they add this feature and it might get better over time.  

 

- No spaced repetition.

- No sound

- Cards are very small so multiple meanings/pronunciations take scrolling to get to.

- Can't delete from the card view, can delete one by one from the list.

- Deleting one by one is very slow.  I made 150 look-ups messing around with it, which took 300 clicks to delete.

- No different lists, just Studying and Known (although the sources are recorded)

- If you mis-select (easy to do) then you end up with extra characters on the card which look ugly, or a card you didn't even want to look up

- Either every look up is saved, or none.  Can't look up a word and decide whether to put it on the list.

- Flash cards are kind of small and clumsy, buttons are small.  I guess you could make a pass through and mark them as studied.

- No way of knowing if you already looked something up, or the # of times you hit it.

 

I could see the Kindle being great for extensive reading at 98%+ comprehension, so you end up with a relatively short list of words, and can then export that list (requires tech skills), frequency profile it, put selected words into a real SRS.   If you already read novels this is probably workable.

 

For intensive reading, better to read in Pleco or on the PC.

 

Edit: forgot the link.

Edited March 23, 2014 at 04:27 AM by tysond