Unsolicited Advice

I'm giving up on Duolingo Korean lessons. I'm going to have to learn hangul before that will make any sense. Those blocks are not only constructed on a logical basis, but the shapes of the consonant pieces are meant to represent the shape your mouth makes when saying them. It takes a lot of effort to make a system like that confusing and evil, but Duolingo has managed it. They really do want you to memorize the han like they were kanji , and... no. Everyone I have showed this to thinks this is the dumbest possible way to do it, including the Japanese lady who has personal experience with memorizing a bazillion kanji in order to read things, and the actual Korean lady who works at the desk on weekends. The Esperanto lessons, on the other hand, are working out fairly well. For starters, the software will accept, or at least overlook, the ASCII-X convention if you don't have an Esperanto keyboard, which is nice. Esperanto involves circumflexes -- aka 'hats' -- on ...

I have of course been poking at the Kindle with a proverbial stick ever since I got it. I finally got around to testing the claim that it supports Unicode by loading it with pretty much every language I read. Japanese does work. The Kindle will display unadorned shift-JIS in the home page listings, although books are easiest to read if you convert to PDF first, so you can keep the customary vertical columns and Ruby-coded furigana. There are also converters available for taking folders full of scanned manga and converting them to clear PDFs sized for the Kindle screen. The display is sharp enough that the furigana in speech bubbles doesn't get any more lost than it does in print, and since most manga are printed in black and white plus screentones, the pictures are easy to render. If it handles shift-JIS, then it probably also handles traditional and simplified Chinese, which shares part of the character pool, although I don't have any e-materials in Chinese to check it with....