I’ve just read Skyblueteapot a.k.a. Helen’s blog and her hymn to the e-reader. It seems to be just what LingQ-ers need. “There’s nothing wrong with holding a book” is a statement that from now on simply won’t hold water for Sprachenfreaks such as us. I shall have to count my pension: do I deserve an early Christmas present?
I bought a Russian ebook reader called Jet Book but hardly use it. but maybe my unit is no good or I need to get used to it. I like holding books otherwise I read on the screen and create LingQs.
Interesting to hear the opinions of others.
Eventually we know we have to get some of our functionality onto hand held devices.
I also have an ebook reader, the iliad.
I’m really happy with it, one of the biggest reasons I bought it was to be able to read books in other languages. It’s fantastic and very pleasing to read with.
I’m still waiting for a good one to come out. Apple is really good at making those kind of things, I hope they develop one soon.
I often read e-books on my PDA. I use Mobipocket and so I can read on PC and on PDA. Copy and past functionality is restricted to some lines, therefore I am not able to copy long text passages into LingQ. There are functions like notes and highlighting. With them I mark new words and phrases and later I decide it is worth to transfer them manually to LingQ or not. It depends on how I often I would use this word in the future. In addition, with the additional installed PONS dictionary I can mark a word and get fast the translation. I often change between paper books and e-books. I don’t why, but reading a paper book is more relaxing for me.
More LingQ functions for hand held devices would be fine. I’m still missing the possibility to work on my PDA with LingQ, for example learning vocabulary.
Yeah, ereaders are nice, and I want one when someone releases a decent product, but nothing will ever replace paper for me. I will certainly use my ereader, but I’ll never stop reading paper books.
We have a good selection here of gadget freaks and luddites. What is your view on the role that Twitter can play in language learning?
Twitter might lead to a lot of involuntary vocab learning if you all had a large following. This can only be good, can’t it? How it might affect your individual social reputation, numbers of followers etc, I have no idea. As I have no Twitter experience, I don’t know how much twittering would be needed to make LingQ stick in people’s minds. How would you do it: via “my sentence of the day in German/French/Swahili is …….” or via “my word for the day is “sales presentation” – into how many languages can you put it? or via “I’ve just read Manfred Spitzer, amazing! LingQ works just like that…”?
I’ll start a new thread for twitter, even though I don’t think it’ll fit your learning style Steve (or mine really I guess), it’s worth a conversation…
I did try doing my reading on the PC screen, as Steve does, but I found I got eyestrain. The ebook reader gives me less eyestrain than paper or PC screen so I can read more with it.