Kindle Vocabulary Builder – Export
If you are using a Kindle for reading books in a foreign language, you
've probably already know
n1 the Vocabulary Builder. I use this tool not only for looking up the words I do not know, but also as a source for the words I have to learn.
As described earlier (
https://www.italki.com/notebook/3075997/entry/673924), there is a limit
ation2 of 2,000 words which makes you los
te3 many words you have collected during the reading process – at least if you have to look up a lot of words like me.
Now
(Below),4 I will show how to overcome this limitation and save your words for later learning. As a side benefit
,5 you can identify the most important words and learn them by priority.
First you have to connect the Kindle to your computer via USB. If you are using a Mac (like me), you have to
showdisplay/reveal6the “invisible” files. Open the terminal (located in the program-folder) and type in (without the quotation marks): “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles 1“
, followed by return. Then
, restart the finder e.g. by right-click on the finder-symbol in your dock while pressing the alt-key and then choose “Relaunch”.
Navigate wWith your Finder
, navigate7 to the folder “Kindle > System > vocabulary” and copy the file “vocab.db” to your Desktop.
To open this file, you need a program like “DB Browser for SQLite” (or “SQLVault Lite”
, which you can find in the Mac App Store). All the data are allocated in different tables, so you need some magic (also know as “SQL Statement”) to gather the information and sort
itthem8 in a convenient way.
In SQLVault Lite
, choose “Create New View” and use
(enter?)9 the following SQL Statement:
SELECT
w.word
,group_concat(l.usage || '(' || b.title || ')
' ) as usage
,count(l.usage) as count_usage
,l.timestamp as zuletzt
FROM
WORDS w
LEFT JOIN LOOKUPS l
on l.word_key=w.id
LEFT JOIN BOOK_INFO b
on b.guid=l.book_key
GROUP BY
w.word
ORDER BY count_usage DESC, l.timestamp DESC
Then, the tab “Data > HTML View”
showswill show9 you a more or less beautiful list of your words, including the context where you picked it up,
ordered on top with the words you had looked up more frequently
on top10.
Simply copy & paste the list to a spreadsheet (e. g. Google Tables). Later
, I will tell you more about my experience
of handling these tables.
By the way, my solution is inspired from this thread in the Kindle Help Community:
http://goo.gl/sR3X13