This guide to Japanese grammaris highly recommended by lots of people because it teaches "real" Japanese rather than a stilted textbook version and also because it doesn't try to over-translate the Japanese example sentences, rather it just leaves them making their sense in Japanese. This last bit is particularly interesting as the "true" meaning of a sentence in Japanese is often highly dependent on the context because in Japanese you're allowed leave out pretty much anything that is obvious from the context, subject, object etc. so picking a single meaning as the translation is often just not appropriate.
I've been meaning to read it for ages but I don't want to print it out and most of my reading now is on my Android phone, e.g. while putting Seán to sleep. The guide comes as a giant HTML file or a PDF, neither of which are convenient on Android. There is however a very nice ebook reader called Aldiko which can open .epub files. Despite the fact that .epub is just zipped up html files, Alidko cannot read plain HTML.
After much searching, I finally found a html to epub converter called Calibre - Google search didn't help, in the end I found it through Aldiko's help pages and it seems to have done a fine job of converting the book to .epub format with it's html2epub program (no setting options or anything, just point it at the html and it works). Calibre is open source and available to apt-get on recent Ubuntu releases. I'm pretty sure I'll be using it often. It would also make a very nice web-service - give it a URL and get back a .epub great for those too-long-to-read-right-now web pages, maybe I'll get around to something like that.
4 comments:
thx..
But actually that's only a part of it, most of it, i think the first 117 pages.. Still appreciate it, thanks
@Anonymous
I just had a look at the latest version on the website. I think Tae Kim has reordered stuff so the stuff at end of the ebook (slang) is now in the middle of the web version and vice-versa.
So I think all of the content is still present. If you find something specific that is missing, please reply.
I'll see about redoing the epub with the latest version too but I'm a bit short on time.
I converted from the HTML version not the PDF version (click the "printer-friendly version"). I have a feeling I tried the PDF one first and failed.
Sorry, I won't be converting Heisig's book. Tae Kim is licensed for free redistribution, Heisig's is not.
TBH, if you own a paper copy, having his book on your phone is not terribly useful anyway. I found that if I wanted to be able to work on it while out and about, I could just photograph the next few pages. Thinking up good stories and images took long enough that I only needed a page or two to keep me occupied for a long time.
If you don't own a paper copy, well ... for the benefit of conquering the Kanji, 25 EUR is really not that much to ask.
i don't think so, fixing my laptop is costing enough already, well it's not like i've read the best reviews about it, just thought to check it out to decide for myself.. but thx anyway
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