New gadget helps me study languages

I have got a fantastic new toy! Did I say toy? I meant study aid. (My husband might be reading this.) It's an ebook reader. With it you can download free books from the internet, or create your own content from news feeds, e-mails, drafts of your own work. Anything you can copy and paste into Word can go onto your ereader in just a few seconds. If you get stuck you can even buy e-books from an e-book website.

My husband doesn't see what's so great about this. He says: what's so hard about reading a book made out of paper? You can read them for free in the library. Perfectly true, however this being England we are restricted to reading in English. And that's a problem for me, because I am a member of LingQ, an internet-based group of passionate language lovers. Some of us like to read in three or more foreign languages. Those living in big, multicultural cities can get lots of stuff to read in foreign languages. Lucky old them!

I enjoy reading novels in French and German and Russian, but they are hard to find in an average town inEngland. I get German books mail-order from Germany, French books mail-order from France and have given up on buying from Russia because of all the currency complications. When I get a new novel it's very exciting, when I get to the last chapter I start worrying if I'll have anything to read once I've finished it.

That's why the ereader makes such a difference. With a computer, an internet connection and a bit of cable I can have pretty much anything I like in electronic form. It can handle a wide range of file formats, and can display about twenty different languages, even Chinese. Since it's made by a Chinese company perhaps that's not surprising, but Japanese products sold here rarely support Japanese.

My reader has a six-inch screen and is about the size of a DVD case, so it fits in my handbag just fine. There is a choice of fonts and font sizes (towards the end of the day I like to switch to larger print). The battery is replaceable and a charge can last for weeks. I haven't filled up the internal memory yet, not by a long way, but when I do I can add a 4 Gigabyte SD card. That should hold a few thousand more books.

It even plays mp3s. This is particularly useful if you aren't so good at reading. I can have the audiobook and the type version of the same book in Russian, and can switch between listening to and reading the same material. (LingQ students will see the appeal of this.)

My ereader is called the Hanlin V3 and is sold around the world under various names, including BeBook, Pixelar and Aztak. I got it on eBay from Pixelar, the (only?) UK distributors. I hear that my favourite bookshop, Blackwells (http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/welcome.jsp), have started selling it too, so if you want you can go to an actual shop to buy one.

This is the Wikipedia article on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlin_eReader

and this is what those useful people at MobileRead have to say about it:

http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/HanLin_eBook

Another nice point for LingQers, it's really easy to copy and paste my lessons, my "LingQs of the Day" and even my entire vocabulary lists into .RTF files and put them on my e-book reader. Now I can do my LingQ studying off-line almost as well as online!