Tip for anyone with Microsoft Edge browser learning a foreign language:
If you right-click on any word or highlight some text online, you can open it in 'Immersive Reader mode'.
It simplifies absolutely everything on the page for you, providing only text, for a distraction-free reading environment! You can copy individual paragraphs or sentences, or whole articles.
I'm showing the side of the margin to show how wide the narrow one is!
You can then control the size of the text, from small to very large, how wise the column of the text is, the background colour (helpful for those with dyslexia or limited vision or just tired eyes - mine is pink for the fun of it), the font, the spacing between characters, and loads more.
You can also try out a mode called 'Line focus', where it only focuses on one line, three lines, or five lines!
Despite being able to read in Chinese for more than three years, I am still sometimes psychologically challenged by the terror-inducing sight of a massive wall of text in a tiny font on a computer screen. This makes it a lot easier!
Here's the five-line option. Please note that my screenshots aren't of the whole page, because for some reason all photos on tumblr that are horizontal don't upload...who knows.
You can also look up anything to the dictionary with just a click. Best of all, however, you can get the text to be read aloud!
There are multiple different voices, many very natural sounding, from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. If you're learning another language, there are at least two options even for smaller languages (for example, two for Azerbaijani, two for Bangla and so on - I assume one is male and one is female). I've found the voices to be very good for Chinese, ranging from sajiao-pouting-douyin-girl to formal male newsreader. Listening to the ones from Taiwan is also a good way to get some listening practice for different accents!
Of course, you can change the speed of the reading under 'read aloud'.
Finally, you can add each page to your 'collections' list - this would be a useful way of keeping useful articles together.
I came across this utterly by chance today, and I think it's a great tool for practicing reading speed and character recognition. Hope this helps someone else!
meichenxi out
