Language Tools

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias, Hardware and Software

Advice

For a very long time, Gerry and I have used a computer English dictionary put out by the Oxford University Press called the Oxford Compendium. A combined dictionary, thesaurus, and quotations dictionary, it is a wonderful tool and I think we got it for only ten dollars at one of the office supply stores like Staples or Office Max. It sits on my desktop in the top righthand corner always ready to be consulted for exact spelling, or more likely, for the etymology of a particular word. At the moment, it is one of six dictionary icons, representing nine individual dictionaries and is accompanied by four other icons each representing an encyclopedia. These are the language tools I use and love, well, mostly.

I don't remember when I bought my first piece of foreign language software, but I do know what it was: the Oxford-Hachette French-English-French dictionary. I think I must have bought it in 1999, just as we started out on this odyssey, on our first visit to Paris. Although I bought it in 1999 I guess it was written five years before that given the clunky installation program. Thankfully, however, it still works even under Windows XP. I use it a whole lot and I really like having it. I could just use the French-English dictionary that comes with Encarta but honestly I don't think it is a patch on my Hachette especially for idioms.

My next dictionary wasn't really software at all. It was a small pocket-sized electronic dictionary of Chinese and English. We bought it in July of 2000 in Chungqing in central China for less than 50 dollars and used it a whole, whole lot for the remaining six months of our stay in China. Mostly, we entered English and got a display in Chinese characters and pin-yin (the latin letter transcription)that we could show to someone who didn't speak English, say a hotel clerk in a small town. You could also enter pin yin and then choose from the characters presented to find the English translation of Chinese. I used this feature quite a lot when I was trying to learn to read Chinese from a children's book that had both characters and pin-yin. I also had a paper dictionary and learned from that how to look up characters by first finding the radical in the radical index and then using that to go to the dictionary proper and find the character. Yes, it was slow and painful, but it kept me nicely occupied while Gerry was doing real work. Perhaps if his contract had been for five years I might have actually learned Chinese!

Continuing our chronological journey through language learning, our next stop was Ukraine (June 2002), where I bought two dictionaries, one on paper the other on CD for the computer. The paper one was the Oxford Colour Russian dictionary, which by coincidence I am carrying now in March 2006. The computer dictionary was a shareware product by a company called Multilingua that was very rough around the edges with a very clunky interface and had no greater vocabulary than my paper dictionary and so wasn't terribly useful. Nonetheless I kept it on my system through three different computers and removed it only in January 2006.

The next computer dictionary I started to use was the Spanish English dictionary included in our Encarta encyclopedia which came in very useful when we were travelling through Mexico, Central and South America (2003-2004) and learning Spanish. I looked at the time for the Spanish equivalent of my Hachette, but didn't find it. Perhaps if I had been in Spain, or even in Mexico City I might have had more luck, but although computers were on sale in these countries they were not exactly widespread. So, I made do with Encarta's multi-lingual dictionary tools. It wasn't really crucial as we also travelled with two paper dictionaries: the Oxford (???) Pocket Spanish/English and the Larousse Juvenil. They were both beginner's dictionaries, but the latter was designed for Latin America whereas the former was really a dictionary of Peninsular Spanish and British English and so of limited utility west of the Atlantic.

In early 2005 while we were in Berlin, I looked for a good German computer dictionary but again couldn't find anything that I was wiling to plunk down my money for. So once again I made do with a paper dictionary (the Cassels German-English hardback) that I picked up for six euros at an Oxfam shop and because of weight considerations had to abandon later that same year in Paris. While in Paris, although I looked half-heartedly at bi-lingual dictionaries, my main focus was to find a good mono-lingual French dictionary for the computer. There were several on offer and in the end I more-or-less followed the advice of friends and bought Le Petit Robert. It was a very good choice and I have been very happy with it. It is a good supplement to the Hachette as it has the etymology as well as synonyms and antonyms and of course a wider vocabulary. I tend to use the Robert first if I need to look up a French word and only go to the Hachette if there is some technical term in the French definition I can't understand.

Also while in Paris, I searched for and bought a French encyclopedia. Alas, here, I didn't take the advice of friends and bought the Larousse encylopedia instead of the Universalis because of the anti-copying scheme of the latter. To my annoyance I have since learned that Larousse also has an anti-copying scheme that requires you to put the CD in the drive every third or fourth time that you use the product. It is such a PAIN! I don't have any idea how bad the Universalis system is, but having paid 80 euros for the Larousse I am very disappointed. Not only is the anti-copy stuff annoying, but on my very fast computer, the Larousse loads excruciatingly slowly and has just about the worst search engine I have ever come across. Unless you type a name exactly as it appears in the text the search fails. I would definitely not recommend this dog. I should add that it also includes a multi- lingual dictionary that I have hardly used given the competition.

Gerry was also in the market for an encyclopedia, but he had his eyes on a German one and plunked down a hundred euros for Der Brockhaus, Germany's leading encyclopedia. I have installed it too, and find it a pretty good product especially as it includes a decent German dictionary. Unfortunately you have to start up the encyclopedia to get to the dictionary which limits its usefulness. I should also add that we both also have two English-language encyclopedias installed: the Encarta Reference Library DVD 2004 and the Encyclopaedia Britannica 2005 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD. We like each of them for different reasons. Encarta starts up fast and has a really great search engine and the best mapping software. Encarta also has lots of almanac type stuff, lists and statistics that other encyclopedias don't necessarily have. Britannica, on the other hand, just has better articles that cover things in greater depth than Encarta. Unfortunately, Britannica hasn't done a great job of keeping its stuff up to date so many of its articles are now 20 years old. We recently gave the 2006 Britannica as a gift and hope that the new version is better on that score.

And so we come to the last episode in this reference saga. In January of 2006 while browsing the web looking for a new Russian bi-lingual dictionary, I came across a dictionary with the Collins name (a very well-known name in dictionaries where I hail from) that sounded almost too good to be true. I found it on sale at a small web store based in California and even with shipping it cost only twenty dollars. For me that low price made it worthwhile buying sight unseen. We pay that for a meal every day in Greece, so I figured it was no great loss if it didn't live up to expectations. Well the Intense Language Office Collins Russian-English dictionary turned out to be fantastic. It has a nice interface, much wider vocabulary than my pocket paper dictionary and comes with two language-learning exercises that help me with the active part of learning Russian. I liked it so much, I immediately ordered the Spanish and German dictionaries and gave the Portuguese one as a gift. I thought about buying the French one, too, but just couldn't bear the thought of giving up my old faithful Hachette.

March 9, 2006