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Viewing How to Use your Kindle to Study a Foreign LanguageHow to Use your Kindle to Study a Foreign Language
By Kathy Steinemann
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EBooks are quickly increasing in popularity and Amazon has the largest inventory in the world. As this article is being prepared, Amazon.com shows an increase of almost 11,000 Kindle eBooks in the last 30 days. This article describes how you can use your Kindle to study a foreign language. The techniques could also be utilized to create reference notes for any other subject. At the present time, Kindle does not allow you to use your PC to edit notes on books that you download from other sources or send to yourself using the Amazon Personal Documents service. However, the My Clippings.txt file mentioned in this article is created by Kindle for all books, including those picked up from other sources using a program such as Calibre (free download). Remember that Amazon has a huge selection of free offerings, including classics and zero- or low-cost creations from indie publishers. As you read through a book, Kindle allows you to create notes. Although it does have a Sym key for entering special characters, the selection is limited. Before you proceed to enter vocabulary notes, you should decide how you will produce foreign language characters. Let's use German as an example. The generally-accepted substitutions for German alphabet characters are: ä = ae ö = oe ü = ue ß = ss However, if you use a search-and-replace to substitute instances of ue with ü as you edit on your computer, you will replace the ue in English words such as continue. Therefore, you need to use something else. Since many German and English words contain ss, replacing ß with ss would also cause problems. Therefore, better choices would be: ä = a: ö = o: ü = u: ß = $ Now as you go through your book, you might want to enter vocabulary notes such as: zusammenstro:men to congregate Kindle will save your notes in a file called Name of Book.mbp (which you cannot edit). Your notes also go into another file called My Clippings.txt. If you are making notes on several books, they are all included in My Clippings.txt. When you delete the clippings file, Kindle begins a brand new one. You can use this to your advantage. If the book you are studying is quite short (like a children's book for toddlers), you might want to study your notes on the Kindle without creating a separate vocabulary file. However even for short books, it is handy to have the vocab notes in independent files. To create a brand new My Clippings.txt, find it on your Kindle's home screen and use the left function on the 5-way controller to delete it. Now, every entry in the new file will be from the book you are currently learning. If you are working on more than one book, My Clippings.txt will store the entries for each book separately, so you can compensate for that later. You will introduce duplicate/triplicate/quadruplicate notes in My Clippings.txt if you do multiple edits on specific entries. You can prevent that by deleting the current My Clippings.txt file, going into the book's View Notes & Marks, pressing Enter (the arrow key next to Sym) and saving each note again. This will produce a clean file. It is also quite easy to delete extra entries on your computer. Once you have completed your book, connect the Kindle to your computer via USB and copy My Clippings.txt from the Kindle documents directory to your desktop (or another easily accessed folder). • Go to ClippingsConverter.com (free site). • Register or log in. • Select and upload My Clippings.txt. • Under Conversion Options - Drag and drop to select and reorder the columns which will be exported, drag out everything except Content. • Go to Sort by and select Book then Location/Page (leave in Ascend order unless you have a reason to select Descend). • Under Convert and download select Click to Convert as a Word 2007 (.docx) file (best conversion option for our purposes). • Select Click To Download. • Open in Word (or a compatible program), then save as a .txt file. • Make any edits required. For instance, after replacing o: with ö and indicating the pronunciation emphasis, zusammenstro:men to congregate would become zusammenströmen (zu'sammenströmen) to congregate • Save to the Kindle under the documents directory. (Files like this produce better results via direct save than they do if you email them as a .txt document using the Amazon Personal Documents service.) • If you are working on a book with several chapters, you might want to save vocabulary for each section/chapter with names something like this (to keep them with the book and in proper order): Garou: Ein Schaf-Thriller 001 - Prolog Garou: Ein Schaf-Thriller 002 - 1 Teil Kap 1 Garou: Ein Schaf-Thriller 003 - 1 Teil Kap 2 Garou: Ein Schaf-Thriller 004 - 1 Teil Kap 3 ... etc. You will probably develop your own techniques and shortcuts, but these tips should get you headed in the right direction! About the Author: Kathy Steinemann is an author and article writer who provides content for several websites, including A Language Guide. Article Source: A Language Guide - http://www.a-language-guide.com |
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