#reading tools

I JUST GOT A NEW LAPTOP. JUST DOWNLOADED CALIBRE JUST DID A BUNCH OF NEW MODERN THINGS, VERY HYPE

ONE NEW THING, IS I AM USING MICROSOFT WORD ON WINDOWS 11 FOR FIRST TIME (I THINK ITS MICROSOFT 365 SINCE I LOGGED IN WITH MY WORK ACCOUNT SO IT WOULD BE FREE, BUT IT LOOKS LIKE THE APPLICATION VERSION OF WORD - BETTER THAN MY WORK LAPTOP WORD 365 VERSION)

AND THERE’S THIS FEATURE IF YOU RIGHT CLICK, OR GO TO “VIEW” ON THE TOOLBAR:

READ ALOUD

When you have it on, there’s a rewind, skip forward, play/pause, chose male/female voice, choose speed, choose lines viewed, it highlights the word it reads, it can split words by syllables, it can change colors. The machine voice it uses sounds NICE way smoother than any other machine voice I’ve heard. It seems to read according to the ‘emotional tone’ of punctuation/grammar, so the sentences seem to flow and slow down/speed up when you’d expect from a natural voice reading aloud.

IT IS AWESOME HOW DID I NOT KNOW MICROSOFT OFFICE WORD HAD THIS??? WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME???!!!!

IS THIS NEW FOR WINDOWS 11???

or could I have had this feature this ENTIRE TIME, for YEARS, and never been made aware????

Anyway its fucking phenomenal.

As you all know, I made parallel reader texts for Faraway Wanderers, Sha Po Lang, and Qi Ye. I have English, Chinese, and Japanese languages installed on my computer (so I am not sure the voices will sound as nice if you don’t have your target languages installed). I didn’t know I could LITERALLY BE HAVING MY PARALLEL TEXTS READ ALOUD. (you have no idea how many fucking read-aloud tools fuck up if forced to switch between multiple languages).

Baffled such an awesome tool existed and no one fucking told me. ;-; You’d think the reddit languagelearning forum, someone would have mentioned this.

It arguably isn’t much fancier than what I was already doing on Moonreader Pro app on my phone (i’d open an ebook and Moonreader Pro could read it aloud in chinese with the sentence highlighted as it read). But this Microsoft Word version has a muchhhhh more natural sounding pleasant voice. And the visual options make things even more catering to what works best for me which is all quite nice.

I’m currently opening up my txt file backups of novels and just having an enjoyable storytime reading along to a nice voice!

I’m... really blown away something I actually LIKE, can USE, that’s a DEFINITE improvement in Word... exists and has existed and I didn’t know... if this is on Windows 10 then I could have been using this on my work laptop before and I didn’t even know... ;-;

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ANOTHER COOL APP I FOUND TODAY:

Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader - its on Mozilla Firefox as a free extension, works for a variety of languages. Works well and does what it should. A machine expected voice, but the pitch and volume are adjustable which makes the voices at least useable/tolerable to listen to.

ALSO, it does what many Text to Speech readers struggle to do: IT CAN READ IN MULTIPLE LANGUAGES IN ONE DOCUMENT/PARAGRAPH/PAGE/HIGHLIGHTED TEXT. IT CAN ALSO WORK IN ANYTHING OPENED IN MOZILLA AS FAR AS I CAN TELL.

I tested it, by opening a parallel text The Rebel pdf in my google drive (so when its a document over a greyed out transparent google drive behind the document). I highlighted the first chinese paragraph. It read it, then had no trouble continuing to read the english paragraph next to it. 

It also works on a site like MTLnovel.com (where if you make an account, if you click a novel to read then in the chapter click ‘settings’ at the top, can view RAW chinese above the English-MTL, to make a quick bilingual reader).

This is the app if you go looking for it:

Pleco can give click-translations for words, which are excellent, and Pleco can also machine translate an entire passage (using google translate). But Pleco cannot give sentence by sentence machine translations. So it’s hard to compare the machine translated LONG passage to the chinese passage in Pleco, therefore Pleco is mainly used for individual word translation. The web browsers can all do click translation (Chrome, Mozilla, Edge) and they can do parallel translation of highlighted text, but it requires some time consuming highlighting then clicking ‘translated with google translate/deepL/etc” then that app is opened then clicking ‘translate.’ Yes, it only takes 1-2 minutes, but that’s longer than the 1 second click it takes in Smart Books. 

In Smart Books app, you open a book, then it separates the book into shorter lines and lets you play TTS audio for each line and click a button on the right of each line to translate it and display a parallel text translation right below the line. The result is: you can replay a line of audio over and over if you need to re-listen to one sentence without having to pause, go back and re-highlight the beginning again etc. You can display a parallel translation when you need it, and keep it up to look at or hide it again, whenever. With just a quick click. (And if you like Listening Reading Method, you can conveniently have audio, target language text and translation text, for each individual line so you can repeat as much as desired). The parallel translation is also nice because sometimes looking up individual words still doesn’t clarify the grammar going on in the sentence and it’s overall meaning. Oh also, you CAN also look up individual words in Smart Books by just clicking the word. You can also save words, similar to in Pleco or Anki. 

Within the article it mentions some things I’d like to point out:

Reading apps that work well for learning chinese are Pleco’s reading tool section (probably the best single app for reading/looking up chinese words), and Readibu (links to a lot of webnovels for easier browsing). There’s also more free options listed, including ones for computers instead of phones/tablets. I’ll add that Mandarinspot.com has a good free copy/paste Annotation Tool which can include pinyin for beginners (and can be bookmarked to use on any site by going to the site then clicking the bookmark), the app Idiom is free and works as well as LingQ, zhongwen extension is a good quick click dictionary for browsers, and in a pinch you can just use Google Translate on phones or computers by highlighting a word/sentence and clicking ‘translate’. MTLnovel.com has traditional chinese text raws it can show directly under Machine Translated novel text if you make a free login, and that’s the quickest way to make a rough parallel text if you want to have a rough ‘english translation’ already made and handy. bearlang.app is a new site that popped up that can generate line by line translations (it’s using deepl or google translate based on MTL quality) and is also a quick way to make a rough parallel text translation ahead of time.

If you don’t know what to read: go to HeavenlyPath’s site book lists and browse by genre and difficulty then follow their links to read the novels, go to qidian.com, jjwxc.com, or go to novelupdates.com (where people link to novel translations) and find novels of shows you’ve seen and liked/linked similar novels/people’s rec lists they’ve made and copy the chinese name then paste into a search engine with “小说在线” xiaoshuo(novel) zaixian(online). You’ll quickly find a site hosting the novel you’d like to read (which is often just qidian or jjwxc). You can then use your reading click-definition extension, google translate, mandarinspot.com, Pleco etc to read. To read in something like Readibu, copy the url of the novel then click the + sign for “New Bookmark” in Readibu and paste into there to read in the Readibu app. 

If you want to read a print novel you already have or bought: open Google Translate (then use Camera and aim at physical book page or Import from a picture you took of a page) or Google Lens app (and click Translate in the lower left then aim at physical book page), or use Pleco’s OCR reader. Google Translate/Lens will work in a pinch but not be super great translations, Pleco’s OCR will work better but be more sensitive to needing a decent image. If the book is not too much higher than your reading level, try to type the hanzi by guessed-pinyin or use the ‘write’ option on your phone’s chinese keyboard or Google Translate’s ‘write’ input option to get the hanzi for the unknown words on your phone. Then you can copy/paste and look up the words in the place you find easiest. Another alternative is to find an existing english translation of what you are reading (either an official print translation or someone’s translations linked on novelupdates.com) and just compare to the translation as you read the chinese when you get lost.

HeavenlyPath’s FAQ gives example reading samples for each of it’s difficulty levels it uses to rate novels. I highly recommend reading through this section to figure out where you’re current extensive reading level, intensive reading level, and reading pain level would be. The FAQ also mentions that if you’ve been reading a while your vocabulary may no longer line up to their ratings and to HSK levels (which I found to be true for me), so to gauge each new text based on amount of unique characters and how many unknown words you’re running into after that first couple chapters of new-story-introduction. 

Again, HeavenlyPath’s novel links list can be found here: https://heavenlypath.notion.site/Webnovels-Books-29ee006777bd4d9fbbd0ea5eb29ec514