My New eBook: 1001 English-Spanish Cognates
I’m excited to announce my new ebook, 1001 English-Spanish Cognates: Spanish Vocabulary Words That Sound Like Their English Equivalents. It’s only $2.99 on Amazon, and it’s a great way to quickly and easily bulk up your Spanish vocab.
It’s a Kindle ebook, but you don’t need a Kindle to read it. Once you buy it, you can read it in your browser, on your Mac or Windows PC, or on a bunch of other devices (including iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, and Android phone/tablet).
Today’s Free Language-Related Kindle Books (2/19/12)
These ebooks from Amazon may be free only for today (and only in the US), so grab them while you can. They can be read on Kindles, in a web browser, on a Mac or PC, on an iPhone or iPad, and on Android devices.
Every day there are new free Kindle books in or on a variety of languages. If this type of list is something you’d like to see more often, please like it or reblog it so I know.
SPANISH
CHINESE
HINDI
- Hindi Children’s Book of Flowers
- Aamoo and Numbers (Hindi Children’s Book Level 1 Easy Reader)
- Tara on a Trip (Hindi Children’s Book Level 2 Easy Reader)
- Sonu’s Trip (Hindi Children’s Book Level 3 Easy Reader)
ENGLISH
Dotsies: An Alphabet Designed for Reading, Not Writing
Dotsies is a font/alphabet designed to help us read more efficiently. Its letters look like this:
As the Dotsies site says:
Since latin letters (a, b, c, etc.) are optimized to be written by hand, they take up a lot of unnecessary space. Your eyes have to move at a frantic pace from left to right to read. Use screen space more efficiently! Have a more relaxed reading experience!
So in other words, these letters are all narrower than the Latin letters we currently use. This means that more letters and words can fit on a line, meaning that we can read faster and not have to move our eyes as much.
To illustrate how much screen space this saves, here’s a comparison of a regular paragraph with its Dotsies equivalent below it:
The Dotsies site has a bookmarklet that lets you convert any regular text online to the Dotsies font.
The whole thing makes sense and sounds interesting. I don’t think it’ll ever catch on beyond a few geeks and early adopters, but it is still a neat idea. I’d love to see some people study this and then do tests to see how much faster/easier it really is to read this way.
