#reader app

So in this app, it shows book statistics. Which I'm always fascinated by. Here's my current stats for Guardian:

It shows how fast I'm reading in words per minute, how often I'm looking up words (caveat here that I keep clicking some words I know reading wise for pinyin pronunciation), shows my progress (4% is pathetic but also impressive considering I restarted today and the book is over 100 chapters). It shows how long I have read total and I'm happy to say the timer does NOT count when you minimize the app or switch to other apps with it still open, making the time read quite accurate (and really calling out my ADHD for taking a break from reading every 5-20 minutes ToT). And it shows estimated time to finish the book. Which is a feature I love in any reading app. And I have to say, personally? I am VERY motivated to see the estimated time go DOWN. So when I see it, it motivates me to kick up my reading speed, and remember fucking words so I don't slow down to look them up again. I like motivation, so I love the estimated reading time. And a fun fact about Guardian, the audiobook is around 55 hours if I remember correctly. So the closer I get to seeing that estimated remaining time go down to 55 hours, the closer I'm getting to spoken reading speed! I've already improved a lot as when I started reading it estimated 98 hours, now after a bit of reading its estimating 72 hours. Huge improvement. (And yes, if you load a Chinese novel in this app you'll be hit by the reality a fuck ton of Chinese web novels are from 20 hours for SHORT SHORT ones to 100+ hours to read... for a fast reader). For comparison, I'm also reading 坏小孩 which is only 124k words compared to Guardian at 304k words... and 坏孩子 is estimating ill finish reading it in 28 hours (I think it's audiobook is 20 hours so that's at spoken reading speed).

And Guardian word statistics:

This fun word statistics area lists the words by order of how often they appear, so its great for if you want to pre-study vocabulary for a book. Or if you want to review common words in it. Or if you're curious how MANY fucking unique words are in a book. Fun fact, 坏小孩 has around 8000 unique words, compared to Guardian's 16,740 unique words. Despite this, I find 坏小孩 harder cause apparently of my lexicon of Chinese words I know how to read, it's mostly words priest uses. And the 坏小孩 author uses a word I am not familiar with about every 20 words ;-; to be fair, Guardian leans heavier into case investigatkom stories/supernatural which is the bulk of Other novels I've read too. Whereas 坏小孩 has many more every day words for card games, school, building descriptions, orphanages, which I do not read about as much.

Changed my mind yet again, recommending Idiom app wholeheartedly: https://getidiom.com/

Free, on android and iphone

can access pretty much anything online and get:

click definitions, from multiple sources, translation individual words, and of idioms and longer chunk-phrases/sentences, all with audio. also their translations are much better now for japanese and chinese

audio - can play the entire text, just one sentence, just a word, can loop audio (you can re-listen to your hearts content without having to select a section yourself and press constantly!) Also not sure if this is true in all cases, but the automatic-voice seems to do well at telling when 地 is pronounced di or de (I love pleco but in this small case it nearly always pronounces 地 as di even though its usually used attached to a word as ‘de’).

I am going to again mention Mandarinspot.com because it is so useful, and free.

I use their Annotation Bookmarklet on my phone - it allows you to click words for definitions when on your phone browser. It is not an installed app, its just a bookmark you save. Then when on a chinese page you want to read, you click the Annotation Bookmarklet bookmark link, and then the tool works on the page and you can start clicking any chinese word for a translation. 

It works on any web browser - any phone, any tablet, any computer. It’s free and its not a download. While I like Pleco Reader more for bookmarking pages/saving words/audio dictation, MandarinSpot’s free Annotation Bookmarklet is great for when I am on a device without Pleco and I don’t want to download something (Zhongwen Chrome Extension also can do click-definitions but requires me to use chrome AND download... and I prefer not to download things when possible).

I just tried the Annotation Bookmarklet on the computer, because I haven’t before. And not only does it still provide click-definitions, it also provides pinyin or zhuyin (you pick) above each word! Which is nice for checking I’m remembering word pronunciations correctly, or for learning the pinyin for new words. On the phone, at least last time I used it, it only showed pinyin when you clicked definitions (which is also fine for learning new words/double checking pronunciation). 

The fact computer version gives full pinyin over everything just means way less steep of a learning curve for beginners who might want to break into reading! 

MandarinSpot also has an on-its-website tool you can copy and paste text into for dictionary annotation with pinyin, if you prefer to copy and paste instead of use a bookmark: https://mandarinspot.com/annotate

Their copy-paste tool has a lot of options. (It’s show chinese only, where you click and it will show definition and pinyin for individual words, is how the mobile Annotation Bookmarklet works)

Mandarinspot also has a LINKS page to other resources (some nice and some out of date): https://mandarinspot.com/links

Notable is Chinese Reading Practice - a site with free reading material graded to various reading levels. It has some story and vocabulary notes, popup dictionary for all words, pinyin can be turned on and off, and english translation can be hidden or viewed next to the chinese. I’ve used this site before and it was great. http://chinesereadingpractice.com/

Excellent question, Sleepwalkersqueen!

I use NaturalReader, which is available on mobile, and on a computer, though I prefer to use the phone version for listening to fanfiction in audio book form. That way I can listen and do something with my hands.

NaturalReader is free to use, free to download. Though, you can pay for a subscription to have things such as higher quality AI voices, or the ability to download your chapters for offline listening on your NatrualReader.

It also gives you: a count of unique words in a book, count of total words, list of the unique words by most common to least common, tells you how often you click for the meaning of words, tells you how many words you are reading per minute, gives you an estimate of how long it will take you to read. These features are great when trying to track how difficult a book is, to prestudy using the word list by frequency, to see improvements in reading speed (as estimated time to read decreases and wpm read increases) and vocabulary (when you start looking up words less often).

I think the app can also generate an Entire parallel text file, if say you had a novel in chinese and just wanted an entire copy in mtl English (maybe this would be useful for people desperate to just read a translation even if it's machine translation?). But I haven't used that feature, as i would prefer to read in my target language and just show the parallel English translation of sentences when I'm confused.

Here's some screenshots:

The 3rd picture below shows the quality of machine translation in the app. As you can see (and I mentioned in a prior post) Smart Books app has some translation weaknesses (with chinese) when it comes to how to phrase English translations of Chinese sentences with verbs that have no explicit subject/object. This sentence more or less meant "Pupu, what was written [there on the car in the last sentence]?" The machine translation in the app also occasionally messes up he/she/it pronoun for another one, especially when the pronoun is not specified in the sentence. These are fairly common issues in mtl for chinese though, so I'd say the translation quality is overall around the quality of DeepL.

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