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E-readers for Language Learning

E-readers are great for reading. They’re comfy and allow you to read without staring directly at a light source mimicking the feel of regular paper, while also affording you the portability that comes with a digital device much thinner than a book that can store thousands of books.

For language learning in particular, they’re great as they allow you quick lookups on digital text without having to bust out a dictionary on a separate device or god forbid a physical one. This page will go over the general experience of using an E-reader for language learning and whether it’s right for you.

Should I get an E-reader?

E-ink is the technology behind e-readers that uses physical pigments to display images, letting you use e-readers with passive lighting from the surroundings. They’re particularly strong for outdoor use as while a regular phone or tablet would struggle with sunlight readability and use a lot of battery, an e-ink device uses no power to display a still image and the contrast only improves in bright conditions.

In addition, simply having a separate device dedicated solely to reading helps many with focusing on the book itself, instead of using a phone or tablet that has other uses and thus distractions.

However, e-ink is not known for its contrast nor resolution. If you wish for the sharpest, most vivid experience for viewing pretty art then a conventional flagship phone or tablet will trounce the best e-ink device any day. In particular, you shouldn’t expect to have a better experience reading manga on an e-reader than on a conventional laptop or tablet. While there are people who enjoy reading manga on their e-readers you should be warned you will have to sacrifice between image refresh speeds and ghosting, while dealing with the lack of pixel density you’ll find on a good tablet.

And as for color, your e-reader might not even have any. While color e-readers exist, they still haven’t broken into the mainstream as most e-readers sold do not feature color at all. It might be come off as odd that color e-readers aren’t more popular given how important color is, but it’s still a technology in its infancy. E-readers featuring color still have a very limited color palette, and the greyscale contrast will be even worse than greyscale e-readers due to the way the pigments are displayed. Even the best looking color e-ink displays might as well look like watercolor next to the best OLED screens you’ll find on the latest Galaxy Tab or iPad.

Software

The most popular e-readers such as the Kindle or Kobo do not run Android out of the box. This is not a failing of the devices themselves as they still excel at their intended purpose of just reading, but if you wish to do lookups or add cards to Anki and such, an Android e-reader is likely the superior choice. While dictionaries can be installed on Kindle and Kobo, there is much less community support for custom dictionaries and the lookup experience can be quite lacking.

Android Setup

Most people prefer to read using ttu Reader as a PWA installed from Microsoft Edge Canary (Kiwi Browser was discontinued). With Microsoft Edge Canary, you can install Yomitan and get the benefits of installing all the dictionaries you want. You can even just export them from your desktop Yomitan installation and re-import them on the e-reader, which is the recommended method of importing large dictionaries on Android.

[!WARNING] Some people have reported degraded performance and crashes using Yomitan on e-readers with 2GB of RAM. In particular, some larger dictionaries will fail to even import.

Then you can install AnkiconnectAndroid and Anki-Android so you can make flashcards from what you read.

In addition, you can map your e-reader’s physical buttons to pageturns in ttu Reader by following the instructions in this gist.

Some people prefer the app jidoujisho as an alternative to the Edge/Yomitan setup as it’s more of an all-in-one app that contains ttu reader as well as dictionary functionality that’s more smooth, though slightly less feature-rich than Yomitan. It has a bunch of other cool features and can also export to Ankidroid, so it’s worth checking out.

Yomitan Setup

Yomitan should work for touchscreen devices by default, but there are a few things you might want to set.

  • Scan Alt Text - turn this off.
  • Yomitan_Settings_1.png
  • Maximum number of results - Set this to a low number (like 2) to improve responsiveness on low spec e-readers.
  • Yomitan_Settings_2.png
  • Popup Shadow - Go to Appearance → Configure custom CSS and in “Popup outer CSS” paste in this CSS to remove the popup shadow which doesn’t look good on e-ink:
  • CSS 
    .yomitan-popup {
  box-shadow: none !important;
  border: none !important;
}
  • Position - some people have experienced stuck pixels (with the progress bar and shadow) when having the popup full-width and appearing in the same place every time.
  • Battery Optimization - if you are using Ankiconnect for Android, you might want to disable battery optimization for it so it doesn’t get killed in the background.
  • Kindle - Don't get this, it's absolutely proprietary and doesn't have Android. In addition, the look-up experience for Japanese using the built-in dictionaries is not very good.