<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Do not buy ever
Review: Apparently, some of interpreters and translators have been commenting on the usage of Benson and it surprises me that they would say anything positive about this dictionary since, for as long as I remember, this community has been making fun of it. Benson is a bad dictionary maker. Period. If you use dictionary professionaly, and if it is unable to translate the word/phraze or a concept, it's absolutely useless, and Benson is full of such instances. I used to be shocked by some translations and used to wonder who ever let him write a dictionary.The other source of misunderstanding between quality of a dictionary and some "I speak dozen languages" state of mind, is the phenomenon of a usage of dictionary itself: when you learn language, you buy a language learning book, dictionary as such is a reference book and it cannot help you if you're learning language, that is what immersion course does. You do not need dictionary if your level of language is beginner's, intermediate or upper intermediate, you have all vocabulary that you need in the book itself, so don't waste your money on dictionaries. Since I am obviously not going to get involved with "Jugoostalgicari" who see attacks to this dictionary as an attack to their "nostalgija" I will however point out that one should first decide what language to study between Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian since they are not the same language. Sadly, there is no good Bosnian dictionary and one does have to have good dictionary of "turcisms" if one wants to explore that language, as at certain point communication either stops or becomes unnatural. As far as Croatian is concerned Bujas is absolutely the best dictionary ever (am translator for Bosnian/English/French/Arabic, so trust me on this), and I really wouldn't know what to recommend for Serbian since they are not so keen on advertising this stuff.
Rating: 
Summary: An addendum
Review: Benson is a mixed blessing. Yet, better dictionaries will not be written as long as we live in tomato sized (we have no bananas) "states" and believe that Britney Spears equals culture...
How does the reader below substantiate his claim except by
ad hominem attacks?
Benson should have included more Turkicisms, yes...but how are Mesa Selimovic and Musa Cazim-Catic writing a language different from Andric's?
Well, let's grant our friend a moment of sheer heroism.
Hereby I declare my full willingness to challenge the reader below or anyone else preaching scientific (sic) objectivity while kneeling at the altar of nationalism.
I will leave my dictionaries and decorations at home, since reading a language involves time, love and labor; hence, more than professional envy and hatred.
Oh yes -- may my opponent pick a language and a literature most congenial to him, be it Turkish (including Ottoman), Persian or
Arabic. Or should it be Romance languages, since he is a Parisien by choice (let me guess...his heart's utmost desire is the EU, nothing more southern than Italy)?
I'll be generous and exlude Chinese, Latin and Nahuatl (aka Aztec for those of short memory).
Rating:
Summary: An addendum
Review: Benson is a mixed blessing. Yet, better dictionaries will not be written as long as we live in tomato sized (we have no bananas) "states" and believe that Britney Spears equals culture...
How does the reader below substantiate his claim except by
ad hominem attacks?
Benson should have included more Turkicisms, yes...but how are Mesa Selimovic and Musa Cazim-Catic writing a language different from Andric's?
Well, let's grant our friend a moment of sheer heroism.
Hereby I declare my full willingness to challenge the reader below or anyone else preaching scientific (sic) objectivity while kneeling at the altar of nationalism.
I will leave my dictionaries and decorations at home, since reading a language involves time, love and labor; hence, more than professional envy and hatred.
Oh yes -- may my opponent pick a language and a literature most congenial to him, be it Turkish (including Ottoman), Persian or
Arabic. Or should it be Romance languages, since he is a Parisien by choice (let me guess...his heart's utmost desire is the EU, nothing more southern than Italy)?
I'll be generous and exlude Chinese, Latin and Nahuatl (aka Aztec for those of short memory).
Rating: 
Summary: Good for pidgin lovers
Review: I wouldn't comment on technical & pedagogical aspects of this book (nouns,declensions,adjectives etc.) other reviewers have amply elaborated on. As a native speaker of Croatian, I can see this book as (at best) an effort to give reader some basic stuff to linguistically get by in what used to be called "Serbian or Croatian diasystem" (funny phrase). I also found this dictionary funny- luckily I didn't have to learn from it.
But- as some reviewers pointed out, this is a basically Serbian dictionary. I don't intend to nitpick, but a few things have to be addressed:
-Croatian and Serbian are different standard languages. Bosnian is in the process of standardization, and will certainly achieve the stable norm in near future.
-there was not, ever, a "Serbo-Croatian" standard language. The same with "Portol" (Portuguese and Spanish), "Hurdu" (Hindi and Urdu), "Czechoslovakian" Czech and Slovak) or "Bulgaronian" (Bulgarian and Macedonian). These are similar languages which crystallized out of basically the same linguistic "prime matter"- as is the case with Swedish and Danish or Finnish and Hungarian. But to describe them as "variants of a language" (British and American English analogy is frequently (ab)used) is sheer nonsense.
-Croatian and Serbian differ in:
1. script (Latin and Cyrillic)
2. grammar and syntax (ca 200 different syntactic rules)
3. morphology (Croatian is a purist language, Serbian not. Moreover, even "internationalisms" like organize are different: organizirati in Croatian, organizovati in Serbian. Bosnian language tends, in this respect, to overlap with Croatian- but not entirely, since it was subject of forced Serbianization in past 50 years and more).
4. vocabulary (ca 20-30% of everyday vocabulary is different. The thesaurus of an average high school graduate is ca 40,000 to 50,000 words. Draw the conclusion). So, this dictionary will, at best, make you an "expert" in "pidgin South-Slavic". If this is enough- buy it. If you want more-avoid it.
Rating:
Summary: Good for pidgin lovers
Review: I wouldn't comment on technical & pedagogical aspects of this book (nouns,declensions,adjectives etc.) other reviewers have amply elaborated on. As a native speaker of Croatian, I can see this book as (at best) an effort to give reader some basic stuff to linguistically get by in what used to be called "Serbian or Croatian diasystem" (funny phrase). I also found this dictionary funny- luckily I didn't have to learn from it.
But- as some reviewers pointed out, this is a basically Serbian dictionary. I don't intend to nitpick, but a few things have to be addressed:
-Croatian and Serbian are different standard languages. Bosnian is in the process of standardization, and will certainly achieve the stable norm in near future.
-there was not, ever, a "Serbo-Croatian" standard language. The same with "Portol" (Portuguese and Spanish), "Hurdu" (Hindi and Urdu), "Czechoslovakian" Czech and Slovak) or "Bulgaronian" (Bulgarian and Macedonian). These are similar languages which crystallized out of basically the same linguistic "prime matter"- as is the case with Swedish and Danish or Finnish and Hungarian. But to describe them as "variants of a language" (British and American English analogy is frequently (ab)used) is sheer nonsense.
-Croatian and Serbian differ in:
1. script (Latin and Cyrillic)
2. grammar and syntax (ca 200 different syntactic rules)
3. morphology (Croatian is a purist language, Serbian not. Moreover, even "internationalisms" like organize are different: organizirati in Croatian, organizovati in Serbian. Bosnian language tends, in this respect, to overlap with Croatian- but not entirely, since it was subject of forced Serbianization in past 50 years and more).
4. vocabulary (ca 20-30% of everyday vocabulary is different. The thesaurus of an average high school graduate is ca 40,000 to 50,000 words. Draw the conclusion). So, this dictionary will, at best, make you an "expert" in "pidgin South-Slavic". If this is enough- buy it. If you want more-avoid it.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Morton Benson has produced some fine dictionaries, but this isn't one of them. There's very little help with irregularities. For example, I would expect, that if the present tense of a verb isn't formed by swapping "-ti" in the infinitive with "-m" etc, that there'd be some kind of indication of this. Otherwise, you look up a verb in the English to S-C secion, and you have no idea whether you're using it right. There's no indication of when a noun is not of the "expected" gender (that is, female nouns ending with consonants, male nouns ending with -o or -a, etc). There's no indication of verb aspect (svrs^eni i nesvrs^eni vid), which frankly, is really important for a speaker of English. Often, only the perfective (svrs^eni) form, or only the imperfective (nesvrs^eni) form is given. Consequently, it's far too frequent that one can look up a verb in the S-C to English section and just not find it. Also, although one would expect from the title of the book that it's going to be helpful with Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian, it seldom gives an indication of which word is which. The best you can expect is occasionally to see (W) next to the Croatian form, a convention that's not actually explained anywhere in the book. If several words are listed, there's no way to tell which is commonly used in Serbia, and which is commonly used in Bosnia. As I would like eventually to speak and understand the Bosnian dialect, this is pretty useless. Lastly, this dictionary gives an impression of having been written "in a hurry". There are lots of little details that aren't quite right. Couldn't they even have put the pages in the right order? If freight costs between NZ and USA weren't so prohibitive, I would have returned this book to Amazon. It's rather a waste of space on my bookshelf.
<< 1 >>
|
