I’ve gotten into reading Japanese books a lot more recently, and I prefer e-books as their built-in dictionaries are a god-send for foreign language learners.

I’ve only used Google Play so far. The integrated dictionary is fine, but one annoyance is that it can’t detect any word that uses furigana. Are Kindle, Kobo, or any other platforms any better?

  • UmechanOP
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    11 months ago

    Can the dictionary recognize words that use furigana? That’s my main concern as I don’t use machine translation.

    • DigitalAudio@sopuli.xyzM
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      11 months ago

      It definitely can recognize them without any problems. In fact, I don’t think I’ve encountered any examples of unrecognizable types of items.

      Granted, I don’t encounter a lot of text with furigana in the wild, but I don’t remember ever having any issues.

      • UmechanOP
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        11 months ago

        Thanks. How about conjugated verbs and adjectives? Google play’s dictionary only recognizes then if they’re in dictionary form.

        • DigitalAudio@sopuli.xyzM
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          11 months ago

          I’ve never noticed it struggling with those either. Obviously, it’s not like I’m paying a lot of attention all the time. I use my Kindle for reading for fun, and occasionally look up one or two words I don’t know, but I’ve never noticed it struggling with conjugated verbs, because it usually just detects the verb’s stem and looks that up. It’s a pretty good detection algorithm in my experience.

    • bobob@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Do you have an example of a book that makes problems? I can try it on my e-book readers

      • UmechanOP
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        11 months ago

        For Google Play, the integrated dictionary doesn’t recognize any word that has furigana on all of the books I’ve read, so I don’t think it’s an issue with individual books. It also can’t recognize conjugated verbs or adjectives, so it would be great if there are any other platforms that can.