Dictionary Reviews! (Input welcome) (Language Programs, Books & Tapes) Language Learning Forum

Dictionary Reviews! (Input welcome)
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Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes

gwyner
Pentaglot
Newbie
United States
Joined 5762 days ago
23 posts - 75 votes

Speaks: English*, French^C1, German^C1, Italian^B1, Russian
Studies: Hungarian

Message 1 of 1

14 January 2013 at 7:22pm | IP Logged

Link here!

This began as an attempt to see whether dictionaries are, in general, using the IPA or not. As it turns out,
different publishers are doing all sorts of random things, and single publishers will dump out totally different
dictionaries even in the same language under a generic name like Collins Spanish-English Dictionary. It's
something of a mess.

Now that I've collected some info, it seemed a shame to keep it to myself, so hopefully it will be of use to the
community at large. With time and updates, perhaps it could become somewhat comprehensive and cover a bit
more info on each decent dictionary.

It'd be nice to know which dictionaries are excellent and which are simply terrible (I'm happy to include mediocre
dictionaries, too, but they're much less interesting). If you have a dictionary you like (or a dictionary you hate)
that isn't on this list, let me know. Also, if you have more info than I provide on a given good/bad dictionary, let
me know. I'm particularly interested in the following:

What sort of phonetic info (if any) does it include? I’m making a distinction between relatively
straightforward transcription methods like Romaji/Pinyin, confusing transcription methods with lots of
inexplicable symbols for no clear reason, and totally misleading transcription methods based on English (Bawn-
JOOR). There aren’t really clear lines between these three categories, so just let me know your impressions.

How’s the quality of the definitions? Lots of 1-word definitions? Phrases? Whole translated example sentences?

Does it go in both directions? (English-French and French-English)
Where’d you find it? (Bookstore,
online?)

Edited by gwyner on 14 January 2013 at 7:28pm

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