Portable, durable and complete...
Written: Jan 06 '08
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Complete, durable, small
Cons: Irregular verb translations could indicate their forms ...
The Bottom Line: This seems to me to be the best dictionary in its class.
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| tgregoryt's Full Review: Nicholas Rollin - Diccionario Oxford Mini/ Oxford ... |
I am usually on the lookout for good language translators. On the internet is the best I know: Google translator. This device is exceedingly useful in that it can translate sentences, but has severe limitations in that it can only recommend one translation for whatever word you stick in it. Due to this weakness, you must also have a Spanish-English dictionary, which provides many translations for the various words. Unfortunately the average Spanish English dictionary looks most impressive on a book shelf, or as a hefty paperweight - it cannot be used on trips. Which brings me to Oxford Spanish Minidictionary, which is similar to the hefty paperweight, but is portable enough that you can carry it in your pocket as you ascend mountains in Latin America.
In a minidictionary, the important things are size (for portability), number of words (for utility), and construction (for durability). I give this dictionary five stars for being very portable, complete, and somewhat indestructible. Most words I have searched for are in it, and the book is light enough that I have carried it to 5,000 meters, and it is constructed well enough that it still functions after many trips.
In a minidictionary, size matters. This one is 3” x 4.5” x 1.5” and weighs around 6 ounces. The thickness of the dictionary will put a bulge in your pocket, but it will still fit in there. And in the event you are one of those backpackers, the dictionary will easily fit inside of it. The weight is on the heavy side for something you might want to carry up Aconcagua, but depending on your needs, it is acceptable.
Next on the list of important things for a dictionary to have are translations. The book says it has 100,000 words, phrases, and translations, which seems about right. They seem to have many, many words, including wacky conjugations such as “hizo” (from the verb hacer). One thing is that they don’t say what form the wacky verb such as hizo is in, so I suppose if you are translating a document you will have to get the verb forms from the context. The book also includes various curse words, although it is somewhat limited in slang phrases, for those of you who would like to know exactly what the taxi driver is saying to that nice mule ahead of him.
The other important thing about portable dictionaries is that they need to be well constructed. When you use these things, it is not a matter of reading it once and sticking it on a shelf. Instead the book will sit inside of a sweaty pocket, get rained on, and be crushed by people who buy too much junk on their vacations. The paper in this dictionary is not all that thick but has survived well. The cover, while it is called a “paperback”, is really made out of some plastic material which has endured well on my travels. In addition, whatever glue they have made the binding out of seems to have held together pretty well, too. This is a dictionary that will not fall apart unless it swims in an ocean, or perhaps gets in the way of a .22 slug.
I consider most other things within a translation dictionary to be fluff. In this case, the dictionary also has a phrase guide, a pronunciation guide, a verb guide, and a section on numbers. Each of these guides is rather concise. The pronunciation guide does not go into the detail that an entry-level learn-Spanish guide would do: it is 2 pages and merely discusses the dictionary’s phonetic code.
The phrase guide is a bit longer at eight pages, and occurs in between the Spanish to English and English to Spanish sections. I would call it of limited use; however if you are very new to Spanish and suddenly find yourself lost in downtown Quito with your brain deciding it doesn’t like to think because it seems to be missing oxygen, you might find the phrases useful. One useful thing in the phrasebook is the last page which contains weights and measures.
Translating from kilometers to miles is never so challenging for me, but I can never figure out Celsius to Fahrenheit. This page does have a nice scale on it so that you can see that a pleasant 86 degrees is really 30 degrees.
The next section we have is a short, two-page section on numbers, which counts from one to 1,000,000 and gives the ordinal numbers as well. This section is followed by what I would call an abbreviated verb section, which contains the conjugations of the standard verb types, followed by conjugations of irregular verbs. I say the section is abbreviated, because there is no description whatsoever of where you might use these verb forms. So if you don’t know when to use the imperfect subjunctive (and personally I don’t have a clue – even in English), this dictionary does not help you out.
In the end the key variable in a minidictionary is portability, durability, and the number of words in it. This dictionary is the best I have found so far – it is very portable, it is rather durable, and it seems to have the largest assortment of words of any of the choices out there. For this I give it five stars.
Recommended:
Yes
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tgregoryt
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Member: Thomas Gregory
Location: Winter Garden, FL
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