So, I’m trying to get into reading actual books instead of just online articles. When I read articles, I can easily use Yomichan and call it a night. Yomichan is probably the fastest lookup method I’ve come across and it’s not a part of reading that I’m will to give up on (yet, anyway). So I’ve converted my ebooks into PDF files and tried to read them in browser but Yomichan doesn’t pick up on the words. As well, I’m looking into turning them into HTML, but I’ve not figured it out yet. So I guess my question for you all is, what is your workflow when reading ebooks? Any help would be awesome!
P.S. I read through the resources and the getting started threads and couldn’t find a specific answer about Yomichan, just thought I’d mention it
Yeah, I use AmazonJP as well. Do you often find yourself getting stuck on words or using Jisho a lot? Also, do you find yourself preferring intensive or extensive reading?
I bought an e-reader (Kindle Paperwhite), added an MDict-based dictionary to it, and use that to look stuff up. I already spend too much time on the computer, so I refuse to read books on the computer. Plus, I don’t have to deal with converting anything.
I’ve actually been entertaining the idea of getting a Paperwhite for a while now. I just wasn’t sure how easy it was for word look up. Is it pretty streamlined for looking up words, relative to Yomichan? Also, do you think it’s worthwhile given the pricepoint?
That’s actually a pretty nifty thing there too. If I run into the lookup issue with images, I’ll be sure to look into it. Right now though, I have text, be it a .txt, .pdf, or .html. Thanks for the input though!
i try to figure out most things on my own and if i am not 100% sure i look it up anyway to make sure i remember it the right way. I am just reading some rather shounen manga tho, so not too many hard words, so i dont need jisho all the time no.
This is especially when reading a longer series, since a lot of words you learn in the first chapters will repeat them throught the whole story
for my reading schedule i dont really have one i just buy a book and then read it. the last time i read was like 5 months ago tho, i read like 15 volumes in a weekend or so and then couldnt be bothered to read anything else haha.
Gotcha. Not a half bad plan. I know that word look ups can be a crutch at times, and slowly I’m understanding more so I do it less. Maybe Jisho is the way to go, haha. Thanks for the advice!
E: Haha, yeah, I feel the burnout. It’s real. I went ham the other day on immersing in native Japanese content w/o any English for a week straight or so and I had to take a few days off. It can get pretty exhausting if you don’t pace yourself properly. Something I’m definitely gonna have to keep working on!
I actually ran into the DRM issue with the AmazonJP books. I used a plugin with Calibre to strip it so that I could get it into a browser based format, .pdf for example. But for some reason though, when I view the pdf in the browser, Yomichan doesn’t pick up on it
its prob not tbh, thats just my way of doing things, if you are serious about learning vocab you should prob start an anki deck with words you dont know. and jisho is often said to be bad because its just translation. people will tell you to use japanese sites that explain the words in japanese instead.
I was thinking about making a transition into monolingual lookups around level 60 so that kanji would be as little an issue as possible. But it’s something I might want to look into sooner than later
same here, it just doesnt feel right, i still use dict.cc for english-german as well despite being completely fluent in english.I only use other websites when dict. doesnt offer me enough synonyms are antonyms
It doesn’t work quite as well as Yomichan, but it’s not bad. Sometimes it parses things differently from how I’d like, and I have to manually drag the cursors to get it to look up what I want. Even more rarely, I can’t get the dictionary to find what I want at all and I have to resort to looking up the word on my phone. It’s annoying, but it’s not nearly so bad as to cancel out the benefits. Overall, it’s been worth the price for me.
I buy ebooks from bookwalker.jp, read them using their in-browser viewer that allows you to highlight words, and once you’ve highlighted them, you can use an extension like rikaikun to display the reading and/or meaning.
I’ve only bought novels on there so far so I can’t speak to the availability of all genres, but I haven’t yet been in a situation where I looked for a novel and it wasn’t available on there.
The ebook reader of the latest beta of Calibre finally works well with Japanese. The scrolling issues and other bugs seem to be solved and it has dictionary support. You can use Jisho, Ichi.moe, weblio or any other. Just highlight the text and it shows a little window with the results. So no need to convert to pdf to read with Yomichan in the browser.
It’s quite the game changer for me on Linux. Dictionary with the Kindle desktop app through WINE doesn’t work at all and you can’t just copy any text because it’s restricted after a few pages. So all that’s left is highlighting text and hit Google in the Kindle app, which then opens the text in a Google search with loads of random spaces between characters. To look stuff up in e.g. Ichi.moe I had to remove these spaces every time. Now I can just highlight the text and it shows immediately.
