Tuttle's Concise Indonesian Dictionary: English-Indonesian Indonesian-English (Tuttle Language Library)

Rating:
Summary: For a tourist muddling through, not for serious learners
Review: Dictionaries that, for most entries, simply give a selection of foreign words for an English word with no explanation of how they are used, are only of a limited use to a serious language learner. This is one such dictionary. A good dictionary will strive to give contextual clues for the usage of the various translations, and several common expressions and idioms that are related to the words you are looking up or working with. A further complaint, and a quirk of Indonesian resource writers that I can't copmprehend, is that most resources you buy these days do NOT make any attempt to mark in the occurence of the difference in pronunciation of "e" that occurs in some very common words. I can never see why, as the learner is lost without this guidence! The problem is that for Indonesian, there are so few, if any reasonably-prices dictionaries that are of any real benefit to the language learner. As it happens, and thanks to the 2003 edition of "Teach Yourself Indonesian" (which does, incidentally take into account the pronunciations of "e", as does the old version! Incidentally, I recommend the current edition of "Teach Yourself Indonesian" hands-down for anyone considering learning Indonesian - It's fantastic!), there IS a good dictionary available, but is isn't available through any of the Amazon sites. It is, to my knowledge, only available through OUP (Oxford University Press) Australia and it's called "The Oxford Indonesian Starter Dictionary". It's much better than the one I'm reviewing here!

Rating:
Summary: Misses too many important words to be useful
Review: I found this book to be of little help in translating Indonesian newspaper articles etc. There are just too many everyday words that are not covered. This is not excused by its being a "concise" dictionary, as it includes a good number of really fairly obscure words.

Rating:
Summary: great value, perfect size
Review: I've been making fairly heavy use of this dictionary and find it indispensible. While there are some words missing (the most surprising being "tanpa", without!), it's quite complete for its size and price. You do need to know the root form of verbs to look some of them up, which requires a little knowledge of the language, but all in all it's a great buy.

Rating:
Summary: great value, perfect size
Review: I've been making fairly heavy use of this dictionary and find it indispensible. While there are some words missing (the most surprising being "tanpa", without!), it's quite complete for its size and price. You do need to know the root form of verbs to look some of them up, which requires a little knowledge of the language, but all in all it's a great buy.

Rating:
Summary: Your best mini Indonesian dictionary
Review: Unfortunately Echols and Shadilly's two volume Indonesian dictionary is a little too bulky to carry when back-packing in Indonesia. On my first two visits to Indonesia I took the MIP Concise Indonesian Dictionary, which fits comfortably into a pocket, and it never really left my person. While I really like this dictionary (and will probably buy a copy of the new edition), with about 4000 entries in each section its limitations were always fairly obvious. For my most recent trip I bought a copy of Tuttle's Concise Indonesian Dictionary. With more than twice as many entries as the smaller dictionary, I expected this to be pretty solid. Most of the time it was, but there were a few problems: some words I expected to find - "swap" is one, "retribusi" is another - weren't included (though there is a somewhat obscure entry for "tank steamer"); there is an entry for "polemics" rather than for "polemic"; and explanation of meanings is limited, creating problems with polysemic words which even reverse lookup often fails to resolve. On the plus side, Tuttle's Dictionary just fitted into my trouser pocket, and its sturdy plastic cover is a godsend given the wear and tear of travel.