I mostly use my phone to read because I can read anywhere, even curled up under a blanket in bed. It’s also become an invaluable tool in my language learning process. Reading exposes me to vocabulary and grammar in context and keeps me entertained while doing it. Although I’m a huge fan of my library’s Libby app, when I’m reading a novel in one of my target languages, I always use the Kindle app because of its superior language-learning features.
Definitions and Translations
The best part of the Kindle app are the quality definitions and translations that it provides if you click on a word. I don’t look up every new word because I don’t want to break the reading flow. When I’m reading in my native language, I try to learn new words from context instead of using a dictionary, so I try to emulate that process in my target language as well. Unfortunately, sometimes a word is key to understanding a paragraph or appears too freuqently to ignore. In that case I highlight the word and look at the definition. In the example below, you can see the definition isn’t visible without clicking through for the Full Definition. To save time in those cases, I resort to the translation.
Note the speaker icon next to the translation. That will pronounce the TRANSLATION, not the original word. In this example, it will say “Disugsting!” in English.
Copying
The other advantage that the Kindle app has over Libby is that it allows copying. This becomes very useful when I make flashcards from the words I don’t know.
Highlighting
As I read, I highlight every word I don’t know. Now I know I said above that I don’t look up every word because I don’t want to lose my flow. That’s true. Highlighting can be done very quickly and without much interruption, especially if you don’t try to be precise with it. I can highlight with abandon and still stay in the flow of the book.
Your highlights provide a metric for you to assess the progress you are making in your target language. If you view your highlights, the Kindle app shows how many highlights you make per chapter. You can watch this number go down over time!
If you want to, you can color code your highlights. You can highlight words you don’t know in one color and other items in a different color. This way you don’t have to sacrifice your usual uses of highlighting, such as marking particularly evocative passages or facts you want to remember. You can filter by color in the notes menu.
Making Flashcards from Highlights
I designate a few minutes per day to go through my highlights and add new flashcards to my Anki deck. I don’t add every new word. I skip words such as old-fashioned slang or words that are too domain-specific to be useful. I don’t want to bloat my Anki deck with less useful words.
I don’t want my entire life to revolve around making and quizzing flashcards, so I timebox this activity. A few times a week, I set a timer for ten minutes and make as many flashcards as I can during that time. If I don’t get to all of them in that time, too bad. I don’t want to let the time I spend on flashcards interfere with the parts of language learning that I enjoy, like reading more books!
Note that the Kindle app has its own Flashcard function. I do NOT use the Kindle flashcards. I would rather put my flashcards into Anki so that I can take advantage of its features, such as spaced repetition.
Getting More Material Into Your Kindle App
The obvious drawback to using the Kindle app is that it is proprietary. Luckily, you can still read non-Amazon texts with the app. The Kindle app uses .MOBI files. Calibre allows you to convert between types of ebook files. Once you have your file in a .MOBI format, you can mail it to your Kindle account to access it from the app. I also use the Send to Kindle Chrome Extension to send longer articles and short stories to my phone so that I can take advantage of all of the language tools the Kindle offers.
What are your tricks?
Do you know any cool Kindle tricks that I missed? Or maybe you use a different app for reading in your target language. If so, I’d love to hear about it!
