User Comments - bababardwan

Posted on: Chinese Graded Readers and ACTFL

"Luddite"

...haha, this term would have been very relevant in the Robot lesson I'm currently studying. 卢德运动

Posted on: Chinese Graded Readers and ACTFL

Gotcha. Yeah, I've seen the way the Kindle does that..it is nifty.

No worries about the app. Yeah, I love it and it's free and didn't require me to go and buy the kindle.

" free Internet access for life"

...tell me more. How does that work ?

Posted on: 机器人会抢掉我们的工作饭碗吗？

Transcript in progress here:

http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/13818

Posted on: Chinese Graded Readers and ACTFL

Hey bodawei,

"The beauty of the Kindle apart from being easier on the eyes than Nexus 7 (I use both) is the built-in dictionary that sits down the bottom unobtrusively"

...so is there a Chinese dictionary? how about a Chinese-English dictionary?

Posted on: Chinese Graded Readers and ACTFL

ok, found chrome in the puter i'm on and got onto the cloud reader and there's also definitely a back button bottom left that works there as well.

Posted on: Chinese Graded Readers and ACTFL

...but works in Chrome , Safari, and Firefox

Posted on: Chinese Graded Readers and ACTFL

oh, yes, I meant to say that in my above reply but forgot. The back button in the bottom left of the reader screen in ipad kindle app. But not sure if I've noticed that in the kindle cloud reader [is that the one you are using RJ ?]. I've just tried to check it out but I'm not on my home computer and I have just discoved that Kindle Cloud Reader says it doesn't work in Internet Explorer ! You may have to bookmark if there is no back button on the cloud reader, or as you say, note the percentage at the bottom.

Posted on: Chinese Graded Readers and ACTFL

Hey RJ,

I have some experience with this.

"I dont understand the fascination with reading on a tiny hand held"

yeah, I know what you mean but for me it all depends, they all have their merits. Starting on Romance of the Three Kingdoms I definitely find the easiest to use is the PC for it makes looking things up in dictionaries a lot easier for me. When it comes to Kindle on PC the app is better than the cloud reader in this respect. The reason being is that in the Kindle app on your pc you can copy and paste stuff into a dictionary. With the Kindle Cloud reader copy and paste is disabled which is frustrating. Now there may be times when you are not on your own PC and don't have the kindle app and thus use Kindle Cloud Reader. If you find yourself in that situation, here's a tip I recently found to get around that. Not as convenient as the app but it works. You basically just highlight any words you don't know and then you go to this following site which has all your highlights:

https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights

From there you can copy and paste whatever you've highlighted into a dictionary.

As for the too small device thing, I do also read stuff on the kindle app of my iphone. When does this come into it's own? When I'm out and about, say at lunch or on a train [convenient], or late at night in bed where the iphone is lighter to hold up than the ipad. No, I have looked in the past for French English, Spanish English, German English, Chinese English rollover dictionaries for the kindle app and to my knowledge they still do not exist, and to my knowledge they still do not exist in ibooks either [but I'd love someone to come along and point out that I'm wrong and there is such a thing]. There are however straight up dictionaries., such as a French dictionary [translating French words with French explanations, no English], luckily I'm at a level where I nearly always find this is all I need as I find the explanations are in simpler language than the word I'm looking up and it's also gratifying and reinforcing to find that you can understand the dictionary explanation. It reminds my of tingyuns advice to me a long time ago, which I always knew was good [but was too lazy to implement so far, heehee] that it's good to start using a straight up Chinese dictionary. I don't know if there is yet such a rollover Chinese dictionary for ibooks or kindle yet but once again if someone knows of one I'd love to hear of it.

As for the ipad, I wouldn't really call that a small handheld device [not sure if you were, but we mainly seemed to be discussing ipads, not iphones]. Sure it's smaller than a pc but it's still bigger than most paperbacks and more convenient. I think these Chinese readers John has produced are perfect for the ipad for me. Because I can read them to my daughter [bed time story...and she try and read as well over my shoulder], you can appreciate the illustrations beautifully [which I don't think would look as good on an iphone], it's like reading a book..beautiful.

Anyhow, I hope something in there is of some use. I hope the highlights tip in the cloud reader helps someone at least. Cheers mate :)

Posted on: Chinese Graded Readers and ACTFL

Hi Podster,

Sorry, not quite. In my last reply I didn't reiterate my initial step I'd mentioned earlier. I was on my PC when I first took a look at this lesson. So I just followed the link in the intro to the Amazon store and from there clicked on the Monkeys Paw and then just sent a sample to my ipad via whispernet I think they call it. Once it was on my ipad I took a quick look and then tried at the end of the sample to find a link to purchase it. I'm sure they used to have one at the end of samples. When I couldn't find it I went back to my PC and just decided to follow the link in the lesson again and purchase it from the kindle store and send it to my ipad. I could have instead tried to go to the kindle store via cpod in my browser on my ipad, via looking for amazon store in my browser on my ipad, or from kindle store app on my ipad [which seems like more of a bookmark as it just opens up kindle store on my ipads browser...just double checked now its still working].

Posted on: Chinese Graded Readers and ACTFL

Hi Podster,

Sorry, only just caught up with your replies here now. Apart from initially trying to look for a purchase option from the sample, after that I didn't try and buy it from my ipad. I went on my PC and followed the link above to the amazon store in my browser and purchased it and sent it to my ipad [which sends it to my ipads kindle app, not ibooks]. I do have ibooks as well but haven't been using it lately, only kindle app. Also, Kindle on my pc does have a link to kindle store, and I do have some sort of kindle store app on my ipad but I haven't used that in a long time as I have been tending to kick things off from my pc lately. Not sure if that helps or not, just that's what I've been doing. Good luck mate. :)