I read recently that a school in Kansas had given all of the students Kindle readers instead of the usual course books. There were several advantages for the students: they didn’t have to drag heavy textbooks around with them, all the course books had been downloaded onto a device weighing a few ounces. Just like a real book they could highlight sections and make notes in the margins. I thought "how interesting" but didn’t feel inclined to invest £150 in an electronic reader. Until I found this… Dave Slusher has created a free Spanish to English dictionary for the Kindle, you can get it here
I ordered a Kindle 3 from Amazon
Here are a couple of pictures to demonstrate. The book is by Isabel Allende, called La casa de los espiritus:
 Kindle 3 |
look at the tenth line down, suppose I didn’t know the word "gitana", I move the cursor to the left of the word using the five way toggle switch
 Kindle 3 – 5-way toggle switch |
and the translation appears at the bottom of the screen:
 Kindle 3 – translation at bottom of page |
So now I can lie in bed and read my novel without having to grab a dictionary every few seconds. Delightful.
Does this work for every Spanish book or just for a few books? Gitana is an easy word, will it also find more complicated words? How big is the dictionary to which these books are hyper-linked?
Hi Tom
As far as I know this works for all Kindle Spanish books and anything you can get onto the Kindle as a text file. The dictionary lives on the Kindle and all you need to do to look up a translation is to move the cursor to the left of the word. It is very good for simple nouns and verbs, if there are enclitic pronouns on the verb it doesn’t do so well. It also doesn’t do combinations, for example “quiero decir” would not be translated as “I mean”, it would only pick up the word to the right of the cursor; so it would translate “quiero” as I want and you would have to move the cursor to translate “decir”. So, no it is not perfect but overall I find it very useful, it probably gets 80% or more of the words I look up. And for a freebie I have no complaints. The file size is 6.22Mb which is not much out of the 3Gb available on the Kindle. You can always remove it if you decide after a while that you don’t like it, or if something better comes along.
I, too, use the Kindle 3g extensively for language learning, however; instead of a bilingual dictionary- I use a monolingual dictionary. The Larousse Spanish for kindle dictionary has over 100,000 entries and recognizes conjugated verbs. I also use the Priberam Portuguese dictionary, which is of similar high quality to the Larousse, when reading in Portuguese. I find that I learn more whilst staying in the language whenever possible. I am at an advanced level in Spanish and at a basic level in Portuguese, though I find my knowledge of Spanish helps me a lot with Portuguese.
What a joy it is to simply move the cursor to the left of a word and have the definition pop up!
I also download audiobooks from librivox.org and gather the e-text for the books (all public domain). I then convert the e-text into mobi format with the free and open source Calibre program and put it on my kindle. I then listen and read using my built-in dictionary for help when I need it. Yeah, the kindle is a bit clunky to use with audio but for $138 it is a fantastic resource that I use everyday both indoors and outdoors.
Calibre is a great way to download news and blogs and view them at your leisure on your kindle for free.
Hi Bill,
I’m about to order a Kindle 3 in the US. At the moment I’m living in Spain (I’m from The Netherlands) and want to use the Kindle 3 for both Spanish & English literature. Do you know whether it’s possible to download the Spanish dictionary and use both the Spanish as the original dictionary at the same time or do I have to change the settings whenever I’m going to read a book in another language?
Hi Bernd
The Kindle 3 only lets you use one dictionary at a time but you can easily switch between dictionaries using the menu to select whichever one you want. Maybe in the future there will be automatic language recognition but its not available yet for Kindle 3 (as far as I know).