I’ve gotten into reading Japanese books a lot more recently, and I prefer e-books as their built-in dictionaries are a god-send for foreign language learners.
I’ve only used Google Play so far. The integrated dictionary is fine, but one annoyance is that it can’t detect any word that uses furigana. Are Kindle, Kobo, or any other platforms any better?
Kindle has a great integrated dictionary, and as long as it has an internet connection it also has integrated wikipedia and translation searches. I’ve found translations to be serviceable enough for regular vocabulary and sentences.
Honestly, I think the kindle has been one of my best purchases yet.
Can the dictionary recognize words that use furigana? That’s my main concern as I don’t use machine translation.
It definitely can recognize them without any problems. In fact, I don’t think I’ve encountered any examples of unrecognizable types of items.
Granted, I don’t encounter a lot of text with furigana in the wild, but I don’t remember ever having any issues.
Thanks. How about conjugated verbs and adjectives? Google play’s dictionary only recognizes then if they’re in dictionary form.
I’ve never noticed it struggling with those either. Obviously, it’s not like I’m paying a lot of attention all the time. I use my Kindle for reading for fun, and occasionally look up one or two words I don’t know, but I’ve never noticed it struggling with conjugated verbs, because it usually just detects the verb’s stem and looks that up. It’s a pretty good detection algorithm in my experience.
Do you have an example of a book that makes problems? I can try it on my e-book readers
For Google Play, the integrated dictionary doesn’t recognize any word that has furigana on all of the books I’ve read, so I don’t think it’s an issue with individual books. It also can’t recognize conjugated verbs or adjectives, so it would be great if there are any other platforms that can.