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The importance of a good dictionary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Greendog Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5275 days ago 47 posts - 52 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 1 of 11 14 August 2010 at 3:46am | IP Logged | ||
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So, in my language studies I've repeatedly heard/read that a good dictionary is absolutely essential to learning a language. I've held off on buying one because there are online dictionaries (which aren't always the best) and I've been using those.
It's only recently that I've started to think that it might be worth investing the money in some good dictionaries. For some languages it seems there are fantastic online dictionaries (www.spanishdict.com) and for others, not so good ones (www.tritrans.net). What are your thoughts about bilingual dictionaries? Do you think online dictionaries are good enough, or is a real dictionary the only way to go? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| michaelmichael Senior Member Canada Joined 5262 days ago 167 posts - 202 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 2 of 11 14 August 2010 at 4:34am | IP Logged | ||
I use online dictionaries because of how much time it takes to find the word manually. I also need the mp3 sounds for anki, not to mention that typing the word into the search engine helps me remember the word. This is what i have been using for french (which i see you are studying) http://www.wordreference.com/fren/ http://fr.thefreedictionary.com/ http://swac-collections.org/search.php?str=tenir&lang=fra I do have a pretty good hardcover dictionary for french though, Harrap's shorter dictionary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7161 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 11 14 August 2010 at 5:33am | IP Logged | ||
It depends on the language that you're dealing with. In general bilingual dictionaries of languages which are popular to foreigners are rather easy to find online. As mentioned above, WordReference's dictionaries for the "popular" Western European languages are fairly comprehensive. The only pressing reason for me to get a bilingual dictionary in hard-copy for a "popular" language is because I expect to do quite a bit of my learning away from a computer. Over the years I've picked up a big two-way dictionary for each of English-French/French-English and English-German/German-English and it doesn't bother me at all even though I know of some good online bilingual dictionaries for French or German. I often have a tough time doing a lot of studying at my computer because it's far too easy to stop studying and surf the internet or log on to Facebook or this website. In any case, even if I were to have more discipline while studying at the computer, I'm often forced to use bilingual dictionaries in hard-copy. I tend to study less popular languages and so I don't have the luxury of getting scads of learning resources, online or not. The online bilingual dictionaries to English that are available for Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Serbo-Croatian or Slovak are miles behind what I have in traditional dictionaries. What's more is that if I want bilingual dictionaries for slang or idioms, I often have no choice but to go to a bookstore and buy them from there (if they even exist). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5286 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian | Message 4 of 11 14 August 2010 at 7:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I think a good dictionary is absolutely essential, especially as you delve deeper into the language. A basic web dictionary or even a basic bilingual dictionary is probably going to be fine for beginners, but as things get more advanced, I have found that a good dictionary can be an amazing tool. Coincidentally enough, my first real Finnish dictionary actually arrived today, and immediately I am appreciating my purchase. Now, it's actually all in Finnish, so I don't have English definitions along with it, but I find that a simple definition is easy to find in online resources, and what is most helpful to me is example sentences, which my new dictionary is absolutely full of. Now, I've only had a day with this dictionary, so maybe it's a novelty that's going to wear off eventually, but I have a feeling that whenever I look up an unknown word, I'll be checking my dictionary for some good example sentences. I think a good dictionary is definitely a good purchase, but only if it suits your language learning needs, and the level you're at with the language at the moment.
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| daniela Newbie Romania Joined 5286 days ago 18 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Romanian* | Message 5 of 11 14 August 2010 at 7:56am | IP Logged | ||
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Also, a good dictionary can give you a sense of progress. I haven't found yet an online dictionary that shows you the list of words. You can search for a word, but you can't open the dictionary to find out that you know almost every word in that page and eventually decide to learn the few unknown ones. You can't skim through it looking for example sentences that you like and learn those, or those beautiful words that you just can't stop loving although they aren't so widespread.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 11 14 August 2010 at 9:03am | IP Logged | ||
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I have found several good dictionaries on the internet, but also much rubbish with just a few words and no examples/expressions. Just to mention one of the best I have seen, the Scot online gives you not only a translation or two, but also an overview over expressions that is better than the one in my essential English<-->Scots paper dictionary. But as Daniela points out, you cannot just skim an electronic dictionary and revel in the exuberant cornucopia of words, - it serves you the language in tiny morsels.
I generally don't like monolingual dictionaries. For me they are like botched lexica written by people who just didn't feel like doing some serious research and therefore just wrote banal circumlocutions with no real information value. Insofar such dictionaries can be used for anything it is because of indications of morphological class, etymology or idiomatic expressions - and then they are rather something like speciality lexica for words (and that's fine with me). So basically only bilingual dictionaries count, and I like to have several ones for each languages, preferably based on different base languages because each base language gives another perspective and other possibilities for translation. A good dictionary MUST contain morphological information, and preferably also contain a minigrammar with declination/conjugation patterns for regular and irregular verbs and nouns - but not more than that. I want a regular grammar book for the rest of the morphology and all of the syntax. It should also indicate what difference there is between different translations, otherwise you are liable to make some serious errors when you guess. And on top of that a number of expressions, but NOT quotes from famous people or things like that. It pays to think about the target audience. For instance I have a Danish<-->Icelandic dictionary which is very informative, but you have a feeling that the expressions are there for the benefit if Icelanders - it's something about the choice of expressions that gives me that impression (plus of course the fact that few Danes buy such dictionaries). I have recently bought a Bahasa Malaysia <--> English dictionary fra Oxford Fajar, and its Bahasa-based section is peculiar insofar that it puts words under their roots, so you will not search for word beginning with ter-, men(g)- or other typical prefixes under t,m etc., but under the root. This is a very smart idea, given the structure of this language which depends heavily on affixes. I would love to have a Russian dictionary structured in the same way (instead of the worthless and incompetent "Roots of the Russian language", which doesn't even indicate whether a verb is transitive or intransitive). Unfortunately the Oxford Fajar has taken up one idea from the monolingual dictionaries, namely verbose and superfluous 'explanations'. For example: "kalium: potassium; soft silvery-white metallic element". DOoh. If you know what kalium or potassium is, then you don't need this description. And if you don't then such information belongs in a lexicon, where you can give even more information. This is a waste of space, which means that the dictionary effectively only is 'half as thick' if you just count the relevant parts. But still it was a good buy. How big should a dictionary be? I would say 20.000 head words (per language) is the bottom limit, although I have a very old Modern Greek dictionary from the University of Minnesota, which is valuable because it gives a lot of relevant information about the few words it cover. You just need also to have another dictionary besides it, and there I'm lucky to have both a good Greek-Danish and a Danish-Greek one, both instigated by the excellent Rolf Hesse (sometimes one person can make a difference!). Some small dictionaries have a tendency to have the words I want - which always comes as a surprise to me. For instance I have noticed that my tiny Russian-English dictionary from Berlitz rarely disappoints me. On the other hand my larger Danish->Latin dictionary from Gyldendal practically NEVER gives me the words I need when I'm writing in Latin. For that purpose I have got an excellent one by John C. Traupman (bought i Manila!), which isn't so ortodox that it refrains from suggesting words for modern inventions and things from my daily life. In this respect it is actually better than my "Neues Latein Lexicon" (German->Latin), which just give long circumlocutions which the Romans never would have bothered to use if they have lived today. Such subtle characteristics of dictionaries are impossible to predict, - you have to use them to feel where their strengths and weaknesses lie. Edited by Iversen on 16 August 2010 at 9:45am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5852 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 11 14 August 2010 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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I never work with online dictionaries, because I want to have a dictionary in my hands and brows through it. I'm too much in the internet anyway and I shouldn't accellerate that by using online dictionaries. So the quality of online dictionaries I cannot estimate because I never use them.
My billingual paper dictionaries are based on three different languages: German, Dutch and English and I generally have a preference of L3 via L2 learning which explains my collection of dictionaries. I prefer middlesized dictionaries with 50,000 - 100,000 entries in one single book so that it is still possible to carry such a book around with me. I want to be moblile with my language learning, because I am not always motivated to study my languages at home. Sometimes I need a change of place to get some more study inspiration. Fasulye 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6039 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 8 of 11 14 August 2010 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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My dictionaries just stay on the shelves and collect dust, so I don't bother buying new ones.
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