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Dictionaries for language learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6794 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 9 of 16 18 October 2010 at 3:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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There is another category of dictionaries, commercial electronic ones that you install on your computer. Those are my favorite kind.
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| Liface Triglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Lif Joined 5709 days ago 150 posts - 237 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Dutch, French | Message 10 of 16 18 October 2010 at 4:14am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes! I love the Wikipedia method. It allows me to understand the subject in a way that a simple dictionary translation never can. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7007 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 11 of 16 18 October 2010 at 6:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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I use all of the choices listed in the poll although I slightly prefer hard copies over online versions (in some instances I have no choice since for instance I have not found online dictionaries of English<>Estonian or English<>Finnish that are better than the large hard copies that I've picked up in Estonia and Finland respectively).
There are also the dictionaries of colloquialisms or vulgarities in Czech, German, Finnish, Polish, Slovak on my shelf which I would never throw out and for which I have not found any suitable or comparable replacements on the internet. However in other circumstances I've found a few online dictionaries to be quite good to the point where they exceed the usefulness that I would get from a similar dictionary in hard copy. For Finnish, Wiktionary is quite useful and arguably better than my Estonian<>Finnish dictionaries in hardback (when we ignore that there are about 45,000 Finnish entries on English Wiktionary compared to the 90,000 in those hardback dictionaries). Many of the Finnish entries in English Wiktionary are created with tables showing full inflectional patterns. In contrast my hardback Estonian<>Finnish dictionaries have inflectional tables of model words in the appendices and the entries are linked to these model words. Thus I don't get an explicit guide to learning the inflection of a new word (BUT it's reasonably easy to figure out with a little bit of practice or review of my books on Finnish grammar) The Serbo-Croatian entries at English Wiktionary are fewer but somewhat similarly designed as those Finnish entries by including markings for accentuation as well as full inflectional tables. The Wiktionary entries under the specifically Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian categories are not designed to the same uniformally high standard, thus steering me toward the politically-incorrect Wiktionary of Serbo-Croatian words (*gasp!*) For Slovak, I use the online version of a set of monolingual dictionaries which provide all sorts of hints of inflection for the entries as well as example sentences. This set of dictionaries is at slovnik.juls.savba.sk/ and beats the pants off any of the Slovak dictionaries on my shelf when it comes to giving grammatical information for words or example sentences. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6433 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 16 18 October 2010 at 7:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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People still use paper dictionaries? Goodness.
For Mandarin, I almost exclusively use my iPhone. I've got one huge but not detailed dictionary (Qingwen) and one detailed but not huge dictionary (nciku). When there's a word that's not in the iPhone nciku dictionary and I feel I need some usage examples (which Qingwen doesn't give), I use the nciku online dictionary, which is huge and detailed. I can't imagine how ginormous a book would need to be in order to house that much information. For Cantonese it's different. There are no iPhone dictionaries, and I've only heard of one paper dictionary and it's been out of print for decades. There's one online dictionary. It's small and incomplete but it's pretty much all I've got. For other purposes I have to turn to native speakers. In general, I guess it's L2<->L3, with English being the L2, but that's hardly for reasons of practicing my English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5304 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 13 of 16 18 October 2010 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
For some languages, quality online dictionaries can be either impossible to find or very expensive. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6433 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 14 of 16 18 October 2010 at 7:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
Note to self: check out the availability of quality online dictionaries before picking your next language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5304 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 15 of 16 18 October 2010 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
I shouldn't have picked Norwegian as my native language. Hard to find quality bilingual dictionaries for any language but English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fireflies Senior Member Joined 5032 days ago 172 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* | Message 16 of 16 21 October 2010 at 3:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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The disadvantage to paper dictionaries is they can split right down the middle. Mine just split. I was thinking of getting a giant oxford hardcover one anyway but it would probably just gather dust as I like convenient books.
100,000 definitions and 60,000 entries didn't cover a lot of words though. Edited by fireflies on 21 October 2010 at 3:38am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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