The web reader is a bit clunky. You need to press-click for a while for the text selection to start. (Normal click would turn the page, but I still think it’s a weird design decision).
Then you can select “search in google”, I guess. That’s also a bad design decision, imo, but nothing we can do about it.
yeah, I’m able to get the text selection selection to work but I was hoping I’d be able to hover over the text and pull up the yomichan dictionary that way 
Sadly not. The way they implemented it is that the reader only displays an image of the text, to prevent copy.
You would need some kind of OCR combined with yomichan for that.
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I didn’t read all the replys so I don’t know if it was already mentioned, but I am reading Yonde Miyo-! 1 from Clay and Yumi Boutwell. It is good for absolute beginners (no grammar, not a lot of vocabulary). The book contains very short stories about his life in Japan and under each paragraph all the used vocabulary and grammar is explained. Every paragraph you find the text without kanji, with kanji and in english. It is a very nice being able to read something and understand it. I found this book and other from the serie in kobo plus.
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I searched the thread and didn’t find anyone who has experience with reading on Honto so I just wanted to send around a ping for anyone with experience with that (or another app I could use on PC for reading novels).
I generally prefer reading on paper, but more advanced reading I do digitally because lookups are so much easier while I’m still learning kanji. Right now I’m reading short stories on tree-novel, which is great (and maybe I should add those to the main post…), but I’d also like to just buy a book somewhere, and be able to do looks ups in as close to the same ecosystem as possible.
Here’s how far I’ve gotten:
I managed to download the Honto app on PC and pull up a book. Now, when I highlight a word, my options are google, yahoo, or Wikipedia. Or the book itself, which is handy to understand frequency. As luck would have it the first word I highlighted to test this on a google search was 胸 (insert uncomfortable face palm).
Ctr + C doesn’t work. So needless to say, searching everything on Wikipedia and then copying to something like jisho is really annoying.
Questions:
- Can I point Honto to another website than those three? And… how?
- If I had a dictionary (?app) on my PC would it pick that up and make that an option?
- Is there a better reader than Honto for novels (on PC)?
I guess if the conclusion is I need an ereader that’s one thing, but I’d like to try PC first since it doesn’t require such a big investment to dip a toe in the water.
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This is an SRS site with lots of vocab lists for various books, visual novels, anime, web novels and stuff. It has links to where you can get most stuff, some like the web novels are free. And the majority of the things have a difficulty rating. No manga yet though.
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I love this Japanese blog, written by a native speaker writing about her life in London.
Most posts are in this format: beginning with a Starter section - a paragraph in very basic Japanese.
This is followed by two more sections of a few paragraphs each: Beginner and Intermediate.
I love it because I can always understand the Starter and Beginner sections. I start to lose comprehension in the Intermediate section, but by that point I’ve already found the previous sections rewarding so I don’t get downhearted.
Every post has audio recordings that you can follow along with - I play these while reading the text a second time.
This blog has really kick-started my reading practice. I had tried joining reading clubs but the material was always too advanced for me.
@Radish8 please add this to the list!
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I also enjoy reading the book series Short Stories for Japanese Learners, by Japanese Language Park
There are currently only books for Levels 1 and 2.
@Radish8 these could go in both Graded Readera and Parallel Texts.