Online Japanese 小説/E-novels

[DarumaBlue]

Greetings,

I'm at the point in my Japanese education where my vocabulary and kanji is just fine, and I'm aware of different grammar bits and pieces and their meanings. However, I'm having a terrible time with composition. Japanese friends understand my Japanese, but always say it's strange sounding.

I suspect my Japanese has very weird word choice (transliteration from English to Japanese) and weird sentence orders. I figure the best remedy for this is to read intensely, and extensively.

The main obstacle to read a book or magazine is the time it takes to reference an unknown kanji or compound on my electronic dictionary. However, Rikaichan makes things much easier - sadly, only for content displayed in Firefox.

So what about displaying a novel in Firefox? Seems like it would really help speed up the time between unknown words and kanji.

Also, any other studying advice for this very strange and frustrating stage in my Japanese studies would be welcome.

Cheers

[clay]

Have you tried Aozora? (http://www.aozora.gr.jp/) It is the Japanese Gutenberg project.

It works just fine in Firefox although with some older books, you may encounter old style kanji or wording that can confuse Rikai-chan.

[wccrawford]

Ooooh, this is perfect. Except for the lack of pictures, it's exactly what I've been trying to find in a physical book! Thanks Clay.

Also, for those that don't know, aozora has 'ruby' code embedded in the xhtml versions, so you can install the firefox xhtml ruby support and it'll turn the pronunciations (in parenthesis) into furigana instead.

The only other thing I could ask for is that the page read top to bottom, like a real Japanese book... But hey, you can't have -everything- for free. Or can you?

[clay]

The only other thing I could ask for is that the page read top to bottom, like a real Japanese book... But hey, you can't have -everything- for free. Or can you?

I wouldn't be surprised if you could somehow do that by importing it into Word or something. How to do that, I don't know.

[Hyperworm]

There are readers that can display Aozora Bunko format text files as a book (vertical text, pages, furigana, etc). You'll lose the ability to use rikaichan though.
I doubt that coding an Aozora Bunko reader that supports rikaichan-like lookup would be a terribly long or complex project, but no one's done it yet as far as I know. ._.

(You can't get all books this way, anyway, though... I'd really like a method that makes it easier to look things up while I'm reading a physical book, and the only thing I can think of is speech recognition (then you don't have to put the book down). But you can't use Windows Speech Recognition in Japanese on Vista without changing the entire display language to Japanese. Hm. ._.)