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Chinese Character Support on Kindle


animal world

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he classes I take with chinese students lately more and more have ipads or kindles to read the books we have to read for the course

Langxia, what is the model of the kindle you (or fellow students) have and does it read Chinese characters???

I bought my Kindle in January of 2011 and was told it featured Chinese characters. It didn't but i found the hack online and everything was fine. Lateron, Amazon did something to my Kindle when it uploaded an update and Poof, it screwed up the Chinese. Every third characters was the infamous square. I wrote to Amazon Kindle Support where I was told that Sorry, but the Kindle doesn't support Chinese characters.

So, I would love to hear if this situation has changed because the support of Chinese characters was a major reason for me to buy the Kindle. Also, what model do you have or are you talking about in this post. Thanks for getting back to me on this!

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I bought my Kindle in January of 2011 and was told it featured Chinese characters. It didn't but i found the hack online and everything was fine.

Is it a Kindle 3?

The following should work to enable display of Chinese characters:

http://www.chinese-f...post__p__230972

1. Press Home

2. Type ;debugOn , press Enter key

3. Type ~changeLocale zh-CN , press Enter key

4. Type ;debugOff, press Enter key

5. Restart Kindle in Settings (Press Menu, Select Settings, Then Press Menu to select "Restart")

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Is it a Kindle 3?

Yes, it is. The hack you offered is what i found on the internet just after purchasing the unit. I put this code into my Kindle and voila, it worked like a charm. No problems with Chinese. So, i decided against returning the Kindle as it did what I wanted it to do. Then, in the fall the Chinese characters didn't work any more. I've tried to input the hack again, but no luck. Kindle Support, of course, is telling me to go take a hike because Amazon never supported Chinese officially.

I am wondering whether the latest Kindle offerings do support Chinese or whether when people say they have e-books with Chinese characters in their Kindles they are actually looking at JPEGs with Chinese characters.

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. Then, in the fall the Chinese characters didn't work any more. I've tried to input the hack again, but no luck.
Were you using it regularly when it stopped working?

I have the Kindle 3, and it's working fine with Chinese characters. The Chinese font used is native to the Kindle, not JPEG. I've had for almost 2 years and have the latest firmware installed. Haven't had any issues with Chinese.

Roddy also has a Kindle 3. Roddy?

What version of Kindle software does it say you have when you do a "Home->Menu->Settings"?

http://3.bp.blogspot...600/restart.jpg

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Split these posts off. Please don't take a passing reference to Kindles and jump in with a completely irrelevant support topic.

I have a Kindle 3 [edit, or do I? I forget which is which], it displays Chinese fine. My guess would be that your files are the problem. Do a factory reset then start loading files onto it - start with .txt or something simple. Or stick a file up here and me or gato will take a look. I can't remember if I applied any hack - don't think so - but one way or another it works fine.

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Gna posted in the other thread before I saw that you split it off. That teaches me a lesson to open multiple threads and then only reply some hours later without first checkin the main forum page if new threads poped up :D

I don't have a kindle myself. The thing my fellow students are using is definately able to read chinese characters as I doubt they would read the books we have to read for these classes in another language than chinese. I will try to check what kind of reader it is and if it is a kindle what model.

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The Kindle 3 has official support for Chinese characters (although you have to change the locale as gato explained), so I believe your problem is that you don't own a Kindle 3 and the hack you used was for a different model.

As a slight aside, I recently got a Kindle Touch and found out that I don't need to adjust anything at all to have it display Chinese characters.

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Roddy, thanks for moving this to a separate thread.

My model is the Kindle 3.3

Roddy, you can see it when you go to settings. The model number is shown at the bottom right.

When i discovered last fall that a lot of characters were replaced with the infamous square, i had not used my kindle for a number of months. Is that important??? Anyway, I have no idea what happened. I used the Kindle primarily for my own Chinese files that i converted to azw via Amazon and then via usb got them on my kindle. 99.5% of the time i do not use the wireless feature. I was stunned when i got messed up Chinese. Kindle Support emailed me several times to say that Amazon does NOT support Chinese and therefore were not able to help me. I tried several times to put in the code as shown in gato's post but i might have made a typo or something when doing so. So, this may have made matters worse and i don't know how to fix it. In the meantime, my kindle has been gathering dust. How do i do a factory reset? I suppose if I know how to do this i will lose all the files that are in my kindle right now but that's okay.

Yesterday, i added for kicks a 1902 book by Herbert Giles about China and the Chinese. It has a bit of Chinese characters here and there and i get the square mistake there as well. Hence, it says in its first example: 我口你 instead of 我爱你.

I hope to hear from someone here on how to proceed. If that wouldn't work then i'll deal with Kindle support again and hopefully, this time around they will be willing to help me.

UPDATE: I just recalled something. In the fall, I tried to publish something on the kindle that contained chinese characters. The Kindle bookshelf did not accept it. When i wrote to Kindle

Support they wrote me back on Nov 10, 2011, saying :

I'm sorry, Chinese is still not one of the supported languages. I'm unable to provide an estimate as to when this will be supported.

Although we don't currently support publishing in this language, we're continually working to expand the number of languages and titles that are available to our worldwide audience, and we’re excited that you want to offer your title.

I then didn't use my Kindle for a while and next time i did, i noticed that the Chinese was corrupted. Perhaps this happened during the process of getting it on the Kindle Bookshelf. Still this doesn't make sense to me and I am just speculating here.

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First thing you want to do is stop converting files, that's just asking for trouble. Get them in .txt format (copy and paste into Notepad if you have to) then put them directly onto your Kindle and see what happens.

I don't blame Kindle support for not helping you, to be honest. The Kindle can display Chinese characters, but that doesn't mean it's their job to troubleshoot every time someone can't get it to work.

How do i do a factory reset?

You Google it. Come on, work with us . . .

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I'm sorry, Chinese is still not one of the supported languages. I'm unable to provide an estimate as to when this will be supported.

Based on the research I've done when I considered buying an e-reader it still should work but you have to embed the font in the document or put a font in a default directory. A google search on 'embed font' should give some results on how embed fonts.

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Yesterday, i added for kicks a 1902 book by Herbert Giles about China and the Chinese. It has a bit of Chinese characters here and there and i get the square mistake there as well. Hence, it says in its first example: 我口你 instead of 我爱你.

I then didn't use my Kindle for a while and next time i did, i noticed that the Chinese was corrupted. Perhaps this happened during the process of getting it on the Kindle Bookshelf. Still this doesn't make sense to me and I am just speculating here.

Since it's still displaying some characters, it looks like the state the Kindle is in before the "locale" is changed to Chinese through the debug command. Maybe the battery died when you weren't using it, and it somehow reset the locale back to the original state.

Can you try the debug command for changing the locale to Chinese again? Please report back on what you see on the screen after each step.

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Are the squares on characters that exist only in the simplified character set? Does a document in traditional Chinese look fine? As I recall, this was the original problem with Chinese support that the debugLocale fixes. It's strange that it's not working now. This is just a hunch, but try changing the locale to something else (en-US.utf8 may be a valid one), and then back to zh-CN.

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@redman. I only use the simplified characters.

@gato. Yes, i didn't touch my Kindle at all for a couple of months but the Chinese characters had already gone to pot. I'll probably never find out what caused this.

I did wipe the slate clean by resetting the Factory Default. Then i started by adding the 1902 Giles book that is a book Amazon is offering and the Chinese in it are not JPEGs . It still gives 我口你. Hmmm.

Then i converted a file of a few pages of vocabulary with lots of Chinese characters to TXT and via usb added it to my Kindle and... and... and... :lol: ... :lol: ... :lol: the Chinese is all working again!!!

Tomorrow i will add some big files and see how it goes. I will refrain from adding the "locale" code until it become a necessity. I will also refrain from uploading .azw files. At this point, i honestly don't remember why i used .azw for all my own files. Perhaps I read in the User Guide that that was the way to go. Or it was the required format for later converting to the format for uploading to the Kindle Bookshelf (for publishing).

Roddy, I only emailed Amazon Kindle Support once it rejected my publication because it contained Chinese characters. The reply i got back is the one i quoted in my previous post here. I also went to the Kindle Forum where I was laughed at for even thinking that the Kindle supported Chinese. Other people later on also visited that forum about Chinese and got the same treatment I received.

The Kindle was the number 1 gift for December 2010 in the US. I bought my Kindle in January 2011. Don't you think that mighty Amazon could have added one page to the User Guide explaining the Change Locale if you wanted to read Chinese on your Kindle (there may also be code for Japanese, Arabic and who knows what else) and to give the simple instructions to reset the Factory Default. I find it strange that Amazon expects its Kindle owners to scurry all over the internet for pertinent information about its hot product that they could cover in a few paragraphs in their User Guide.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. So, I challenge any one here to try and publish something in Chinese for the Kindle. Try something simple like a greeting card or a Happy New Year's Card. Right now, i don't have the stamina for that step yet.

Anyway, my thanks to everybody for making my Kindle useful again!

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I don't know if this is the source of your troubles, but I never convert to the AZW format. I always go with MOBI. Also, if you have an Apple device you can install the Kindle app on it and preview how books or documents should look on the Kindle (you can be completely confident that the Kindle app supports Chinese text without needing to fiddle with the locale).

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AZW is an encrypted version of MOBI.

If I need to send a Chinese document to my @kindle.com personal document account for conversion, I usually send it in a MS Word doc. That helps to avoid problems with encoding that sometimes occurs with other formats.

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I can't open a file in my kindle if i sent it as a Word doc. Maybe that's because i didn't input the locale code. For now, i'm happy with the txt option!

Feihong, i honestly don't remember what made me decide that .azw was critical--i must have read it somewhere and misinterpreted the information. I don't know. The 1903 book by Giles is in azw format. So, this shows that chinese characters will be a mess in that format without inputting the locale code. I vaguely remember MOBI. I believe i had to convert my AZW files to MOBI in order to get them on the "Bookshelf." Why do you use Mobi and how do get that file format?

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I can't open a file in my kindle if i sent it as a Word doc.

What do you mean by "can't open"?

If a Word doc gets sent to your @kindle.com personal document account, Amazon would convert it into AZW format and make it available for download on your Kindle just like any other native Kindle file.

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you should try 多看, its a Chinese-made substitute operating system for the Kindle and I found it very helpful when reading Chinese books. I also found its PDF support better.... You install it alongside the original Kindle operating system and can switch between them

http://www.duokan.com/

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What do you mean by "can't open"?

If a Word doc gets sent to your @kindle.com personal document account, Amazon would convert it into AZW format and make it available for download on your Kindle just like any other native Kindle file.

Misunderstanding. I thought you meant to suggest sending a doc file directly to your kindle. That doesn't work. In the past, i would always use doc files and sent them to me@kindle.com and then i go azw files back. But i want to avoid azw files and the hack for as long as possible.

you should try 多看

Thanks for the suggestion, panpan, but i rather keep it simple for as long as i can get away with it.

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