Thanks for your detailed answer! It’s very interesting how different workflows people have to cover the same need.
Answers to lunacodes on dictionary usage on Bookwalker
I see what you mean. It’s very hard for an integrated dictionary to pick up expressions like 歓声をあげて. I’m glad you found a system that works for you. Akebi is fine, and I try to use it (or Takoboto) when reading on Android, but I hate switching between apps on my phone. I hate Google translate even more though, the times it has given me totally wrong translations and even wrong readings are countless. And I also dislike having only one possible meaning given for any given word. I love reading through a dictionary’s multiple definitions, the nuance in the book is very often not the first definition that comes up, after all. And it’s easier to get a fuller picture of a word by reading more about what it might mean. But I digress.
I had forgotten about that! You’re so right, this is the most annoying feature ever, and I remember hating it with a passion when I last read on Kindle.
Bookwalker on iOS uses the integrated dictionaries (a JP-JP one and a JP-EN one, both good) instead of Google or any other translation service. The dictionaries are probably better than the ones on Kindle in catching inflected words, but they also fail sometimes. In those cases, or when I want to look up an expression, I have Midori and the Dictionary app on a side drawer. It only takes a flick to have the the dictionary and the text in front of me at the same time (that’s on iPad, not sure if a smaller screen would be different). If I can’t guess the reading to directly type into the dictionaries, I usually try the integrated dictionary first (the monolingual dictionary catches more words for some reason) to get the reading, the type it into my dictionary apps on the side. If the integrated dictionary comes up with nothing, I use Bookwalker’s search function to copy the text (only way to do it I think), then paste into the dictionary app.
Sorry to everyone for derailing the thread once again. Dictionary usage while reading would definitely warrant a thread on its own, but since we started talking here, it felt strange to interrupt the conversation to move it elsewhere.
To bring things back on topic, these days I’m reading 予言の島 with the Spooky Summer Club (on WK), started 木洩れ日に泳ぐ魚 ahead of time to make sure I can keep up with the Mystery club here on its first week while I’m travelling, and the strangest collection of stories I have read in a while, 穴らしきものに入る. The first story was about someone who develops a compulsion to enter (impossible) holes, like the water hose or the binder holes on work documents. The second was about a family who find out a relative had gold bones after his cremation, and the third one about a woman who abhors sunlight, and goes to extremes to ensure that it never touches her skin, even when she’s out and about. A riot of absurdity, and good fun. Looking forward to the next two stories.
And I’m also sort of super slowly progressing through 山の霊異記 幻惑の尾根, which I started ages ago. It’s a collection of very short eerie stories, all supposedly experienced by the author while hiking the mountains of Japan. It’s well enough written, no story is particularly gruesome or scary, and I love the mountain atmosphere, but there’s such a lot of them, and it gets quite repetitive after a while. It’s probably that the stories are so short and that the stakes aren’t really high, but I don’t feel any urgency to read the remaining ones. Maybe when I crave the cool expanse of nature around me they’ll be a good fit.
