A round of applause for Mobipocket!

Everyone is reading nowadays. Vera and my Hungarian tandem partner are reading and listening to Harry Potter in Swedish and Norwegian, and Doviende is reading Polish without much prior knowledge of the language. Just a couple of days ago, my Hungarian tandem partner sent me the link to Alice in Wonderland, both the text and audio (I wrote about it on lang-8 today). I immediately thought that it would be too difficult, and I had already started another book in Hungarian. I changed my mind today though, and gave it a try. Just a bit. My last try was with Jane Eyre, but then I had a parallel text in Hungarian and English. Now I just have the Hungarian.

First of all, I downloaded the .lit e-book, and converted it to mobi-format (so that it will be readable on my Kindle) and started reading it in the Calibre e-book reader on my computer while listening to the audio (Kindle, after all, isn't all that flexible...). I soon realized that I wanted to take notes though. Some words kept appearing, and I thought it would be great to be able to add a note to those. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any way of doing this in Calibre. Mobipocket Reader came to my rescue though! If anyone wonders why I don't simply read a Word document, I just have to say that e-book format is 1000 times more pleasant to read even on the computer. Changing the background color from white to beige, for one, helps a lot, and you get the text divided into appropriately wide columns so that you don't lose focus and don't have to move your eyes all that much. Flipping pages is ever so easy (space key), which is excellent when you are concentrating like mad to keep up with the audio while trying to make clever reflections on what you read. In Mobipocket, you can very simply highlight words, copy them, and add notes to them that are saved in a column to your right (perfect if you want to add them to ANKI later).

(Click to enlarge.)

I've read the first chapter, which was 15 minutes of audio, and I can't say I understood all that many words. I know what happens in the first chapter since I have seen the movie, so I was able to tag along, so to say. I find that what may be even more important than actually understanding all the words is to get a grasp on word order. Word order is, like in all languages that claim to have "free word order", annoyingly difficult in Hungarian, more so than in Russian. Also, I think that you pick up correct usage of small particle words, multiple negations, possessive constructions (these things aren't as easy in Hungarian as in all the Indo-European languages I've studied) from just pure exposure.

Oh, and Alice in Wonderland turn out to be much easier than I thought, since I was set on not understanding anything.

Using Kindle

Due to lack of time haven't been able to use my Kindle as much as I would have liked. I have, however, tried it out and I am very satisfied with how it works! Reading is painless, just like reading a normal book, and looking up words and taking notes is extremely easy. Yesterday I read a French book and decided to check out if there were any French dictionaries available for the Kindle. There was one, however it was quite small and got bad reviews, so I decided to not buy it. I'll just have to wait and see, perhaps they will make another one available. I also noticed that there were actually some French books available in the store. Shocking!

Another good thing that happened was that the Unicode hack for the international Kindle was "released". I can now read Russian on it! However, it doesn't display Swedish and French letters anymore. I am counting on this being fixed, or I'm screwed ^^

Christmas came early this year.

I received my Christmas present from my boyfriend very early this year. When the Kindle went international, he decided to buy me one! It is an incredibly elegant little thing and the electronic ink is truly impressive. The only thing I am now waiting for is the Unicode hack for the international Kindle! It is incredible that they would release an international version and still not include Unicode on it. Scandalous even, but I guess that's what Anglo-mania is all about. I mean seriously, who needs any other language than English?

Once I get this high tech toy to read Cyrillic, my literary exploits shall know no limits! I really want to read all the huge Russian classics, but finding the actual books is always an obstacle and everyone who knows me knows that I don't really like to read on the computer. Of course Amazon has no e-books in any other languages than English available, but since the Kindle can read simple text documents and since you can't convert files, nothing is easier than acquiring all the old Russian classics. Right now I have a large number of works by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in English on my Kindle (the very kind boyfriend was thoughtful enough to load it with those) and as soon as I get some free time I am going to read something :-)

One really neat feature is that with the inbuilt English dictionary you can look up any word in the text you are reading by somehow clicking on it (I'm not really sure exactly how it works, sometimes I have to click around a bit before I get the translation, but once I get it going it seems to be working just fine... perhaps I should stop playing "male" and actually read some instructions on how to use it :-)) and this just opens up extremely interesting possibilities for the future. You know, that future when this thing is actually international and not just pseudo-international. Reading Russian texts with an inbuilt Russian dictionary... a girl can always dream!