Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Reading Chinese on my Paperwhite I need to look up lots of characters. Often the Kindle offers me the Wikipedia lookup first and I have to swipe over to the translation or dictionary. Wikipedia is literally never the one I want. Is there a way to stop the Kindle from going to it, or at least stop the Kindle from offering it as the first choice?
People not familiar with Chinese may not see why this is such a problem, so I'll explain. Many (maybe most) words in modern Chinese are two characters long. But sentences are written with no breaks between words. So you often look up two-character combinations -- and you will often pick two characters that some given dictionary does not recognize as one word. In that case Bing translate will almost always get it right for you. Wikipedia will almost never help at all. Wikipedia is great, but is not designed to help people read novels!
Combined with other infelicities in the way Kindle handles Chinese characters, the frequent pointless detours through Wikipedia waste a lot of time.
Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg
(3)More posts by @Badria
3 Comments
Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best
I share your pain and although I don't have a solution (almost in 2020...) I do have a viable explanation why they keep it this way.
Two factors, based on my thinking:
- They don't want to show an empty card, so they switch to another source when a dictionary definition is not found. (to Wikipedia)
- They have to pay for translations over a certain quota, so they avoid doing unnecessary queries, and therefore will never show the online translation card first.
In addition, it seems likely that they don't pay for Wikipedia searches and don't care about the unnecessary, pointless, mindless load that they make on Wikipedia servers.
In my opinion they should show the dictionary card first, regardless of whether a definition was found. Show the online translation second, and the Wikipedia one third. (Assuming that they would never pay extra and show the online translation first... which would actually be best for users). So I suggest that they ALWAYS show:
Dictionary-Translation-Wikipedia
Current behavior, as of Dec 2019:
Regardless of whether the WiFi is turned on, they show:
- Dictionary-Wikipedia-Translation when the term is found in the dictionary.
- Wikipedia-Translation-Dictionary when the term is NOT found in the dictionary.
Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg
I just found out the perfect method:
Step 1: Choose your secondary dictionary (for me, it's Oxford Dictionary) in the settings of the device as the main dictionary.
Step 2: When you start a new book, click on a word and choose your favorite (in my case: hungarian) dictionary instead of secondary.
So, kindle will know that if your mother language dictionary can't find a word, it has to switch to the 2nd dictionary instead of Wikipedia.
Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg
No, you cannot.
Airplane mode just makes Kindle go to the Wikipedia panel to tell you to turn off airplane mode. As Nemo XXX says, this happens when the the word is not in the dictionary.
If a word is not even in the dictionary, Wikipedia is unlikely to have an article on it! But for now Kindle insists on letting the Wikipedia panel give you this bad news. Only then will Kindle let you go to translate for the answer you actually wanted.
Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg