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Comment by greybox | Hacker News Reader

I'm learning Japanese and something like this would be beneficial.

> You should be able to tap on a word and get a translation.

This functionality is available already on Kindle though :) you have the option of uploading your own dictionaries to it too.

That, combined with using https://www.clippings.io/ to manage highlighted text, makes the kindle an all round great tool for learning languages from books, or any text really. (you can use calibre to convert into and between most ebook formats)

I look forward to seeing where this goes! I imagine the really difficulty will be applying it to more than just German. Especially when you branch outside of indoeuropean languages

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I built something like this for iOS/macOS, Manabi Reader, specifically for Japanese: https://reader.manabi.io It has collections of short stories and other RSS-based reading materials for different levels. The reading materials are all written by native speaker humans, not AI-generated. It's also a general purpose web browser and RSS reader.

Beyond Kindle capabilities, it also tracks the words, kanji, sentences you read to show you analytics based on that, chart your progress against JLPT levels simply by reading, and uses that data (all in your own iCloud/device storage) to coordinate flashcard review. I recently added early Anki integration. Still working hard on it, bringing more languages soon and cross-plat via SwiftWASM a bit later.

I find the feature on Kindle to be awful to use. It's sluggish and I've got to do additional work to import the highlights into clippings where I'll then have to do more work to put it somewhere I can consistently review? ugh. The experience OP and software like LingQ have created makes learning words a joy and it's sustainable.

NHK Web News Easy is pretty good. I built a simple browser extension that would hide the furigana and then show it when you clicked on it. If you're interested, I could dig that up.

Ultimately, I got sick of splicing together different home-grown tools and different web sites that I started to build my own to provide a more integrated learning experience that adapts to how students want to learn.

I am working on a Japanese course with a well-known Japanese teacher, and we're hoping to start rolling that out soon. Feel free to DM me if you're interested in that or want to chat about learning Japanese.

That sounds like a cool project! I started off with NHK Easy but recently moved on to normal NHK news, NHK easy is such a fantastic resource. And having something that shows Furigana to you only when you click on the text sounds great! Right now I'm using Migaku for all my text highlighting / tooltip needs, which is working out great!

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