Kyle Corrie Senior Member United States Joined 4640 days ago 175 posts - 464 votes
| Message 1 of 5 23 July 2013 at 11:26pm | IP Logged |
Recently I made the switch from an iPhone operating iOS to a different Android device.
On iOS I had the classic Collins dictionary apps with the purple and white GUI which I
thought were awesome. I assumed, wrongfully, that I'd be able to get those same type of
apps on the new Android device.
Unfortunately, the new Collins dictionaries seem to be much, much worse than the old
ones. Unless I'm doing something wrong or missing something, it seems they've eliminated
a lot of word explanations and conjugations completely.
I was just wondering if anyone had any suggestions for a good production series of
dictionaries that utilizes English as its base language.
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malbonheur Triglot Newbie Peru Joined 4210 days ago 4 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Spanish*, French, EnglishC1 Studies: German
| Message 2 of 5 12 August 2013 at 10:26am | IP Logged |
the Goldendict app is a good alternative in Android, it not only supports startdict format but also .bgl the Babylon dictionaries
format, however you''d have to get those dictionaries by not so legal means.
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hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4941 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 3 of 5 12 August 2013 at 4:22pm | IP Logged |
malbonheur wrote:
the Goldendict app is a good alternative in Android, it not only
supports startdict format but also .bgl the Babylon dictionaries
format, however you''d have to get those dictionaries by not so legal means. |
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If you're referring to the Babylon dictionaries, that's untrue. They offer them for
free on their own site:
http://www.babylon.com/free-dictionaries/
You still have to extract them from the downloaded "exe" file, but there are freely
available utilities to do that.
The Babylon dictionary that I have for Turkish seems quite complete.
R.
==
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malbonheur Triglot Newbie Peru Joined 4210 days ago 4 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Spanish*, French, EnglishC1 Studies: German
| Message 4 of 5 12 August 2013 at 10:26pm | IP Logged |
well, I obviously meant their premium dictionaries: their Larousse Compact, and Duden and Pons dictionaries are very good. I
think you for now can only bye them through their app and it's more complicated getting the .bgl than simply extracting from
an .exe file with winzip
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Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4479 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali
| Message 5 of 5 13 August 2013 at 8:46pm | IP Logged |
Oxford Spanish Dictionary, Italian Oxford Paravia Dictionary are good
Oxford Chinese Dictionary is good (but it's not available anymore from GooglePlayStore),
same for Oxford Mini Japanese Dictionary.
As for Collins dictionaries available on PlayStore which I got:
1) Chinese - okay, but nothing special
2) French - just okay
3) Portuguese - the same as the print dictionary but with some spelling mistakes
4) Norwegian - okayish (but it has only En-No direction)
5) Japanese Collins Gem (Jap-En, En-Jap) , this dictionary has nothing to do with the print edition (Collins Gem Japanese Dictionary is in fact Collin Shubun English-Japanese dictionary), android app called ''Collins Gem'' is very basic, with very few examples and colocations; furthermore the pitch accent of Japanese words is not indicated (unlike in the paper Collins Gem English-Japanese)
6) Collins Malay is good, surprisingly.
For Chinese, Pleco is the thing to get.
For Japanese, I also got Berlitz Basic Japanese (50K entries in both directions, pretty good) Obunsha Japanese (E-J, J-N) and Shogakukan (E-J, J-E) .
For Portuguese I bought Dicionário Michäelis ( PtBr-EnUS, EnUS-PtBr) .
Edited by Medulin on 13 August 2013 at 9:39pm
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