I present today, the free reader app Duoreader!
The app has several short novels and also some articles, and provides them in parallel texts. It also provides audio for both the languages you select (so you could pick a story with chinese/English text or french/Japanese etc). It also has the ability to look up words with a click dictionary. I'm not quite sure how to utilize that feature though, as the way my phone is set up Google Translate is always an option go highlight and translate text so that's what I end up doing in that app.
It's basically a really convenient app for reading, reading listening, getting parallel texts for an upper beginner/lower intermediate learner where you can start to push into non graded materials but aren't ready to give up some support tools and would like to start with something on the easier end (a lot of the novels on here are stuff i read from 8th grade to 10th grade in school or stuff I've seen read in another language as first novels in a class - The Little Prince, Around the World in 80 Days, Alice in Wonderland etc). Each of these novels is between Around 1-3 hours of audio so theyre short listens/reads, and even if you spend 3x the time just looking up words and figuring out each sentence, one of these novels is not a huge time commitment (for fun, zhenhun is at minimum 26 hours of audio... so zhenhuns a significantly bigger time commitment even if I never pause at all ToT).
I plan to try a Listening-Reading Method experiment with Duoreader app in Japanese at some point, just because I think I can manage it with a short novel. I'd do step 2 (Language 2 audio/Language 2 text), and step 3 (Language 2 audio/Language 1 text follow along). Then doing L2/L2 again slower with pauses/repetition to catch a lot of words I can figure out with the context if I just slow down. I may do the initial step 2 slow too, since I can comprehend a lot more Japanese if I slow down to break up the sentences mentally and figure out the grammar and word amount (then with a parallel text and Kanji I can figure out some word meanings). Alice in Wonderland takes about 1 hour to read, I'll give myself 1.5 hours for all the relistening to some sentences. Maybe 2 hours for the step 2 sessions where I slow down and try to break down sentences. So 5.5 hours to L R Method with Alice and Wonderland. Even if I double that and do some steps more, it should be a 1-3 day project. Certainly something I can do within a week and see if it works. I've often mentioned Wasabi Japanese websites lessons, because one of their courses is basically intensive listening reading repetition with short passages to learn and I love that style of study (and their other courses similarly work in a way that works well for me). Well L R Method works a lot like that for me when I put the effort in.
This is what Duoreader looks like:
I tried a little bit the other day, just to see how much I could understand. I did a lot of relistening to sentences over and over. And comparing the Japanese to English. After a little while I realized I knew a lot of words in that first paragraph already I just hadn't learned to READ them (and definitely not recognize them at speaking speed). A bit of breaking down sentences later, I'd made some progress. It's not anything impressive yet lol! But for me it was a big deal to manage to read that first paragraph and mostly get what parts meant what with the help of the parallel text. I also noticed this app uses a combo of hiragana at some times and Kanji other times for words that can be spelled with both. Kodomo for child was spelled both with Kanji and hiragana in this and I didn't even recognize it at first cause I'm used to only reading it in Kanji. It was good practice trying to recognize it both ways.
