HarperCollins Spanish Concise Dictionary

Rating:
Summary: Best value for price I've seen in a dictionary so far
Review: Foreign language dictionaries are one of the few new book bargains left, since you can often get a decent paperback one for under ten bucks. Unless you need one with hundreds of thousands of entries, or one that includes specialized scientific, technical, medical, or financial and business vocabularies, you can usually get by with one of the cheaper ones.

Note that this review is for the British edition, which was titled Collins Spanish Dictionary PLUS Grammar, but it was published in the U.S. under the above title, so it's the same except for that.

So far this seems to be an excellent dictionary. It's 1300 pages long, which makes it a pretty thick book for a paperback. In addition to the dictionary, it includes a 300-page grammar of Spanish. The grammar discusses all the major verb tenses, indicative, preterite, future, conditional, progressive tenses, and the subjunctive, and so on, the last of which is a problem for English speakers since it doesn't exist much there anymore.

The grammar section has over 70 verb tables showing the complete conjugation for that verb, and an index of 2800 verbs cross-referenced to the appropriate conjugation table. The grammar section also includes hundreds examples of verbs governing a preposition in Spanish and how they are used, idiomatic usages of verbs, the differences between Ser and Estar, translation problems encountered, and Spanish phonetics and pronunciation. Of course there are sections on nouns, adjectives, articles, conjunctions, and the other parts of speech, too, but verbs and prepositions are usually the main difficulty encountered by English speakers in Spanish.

The front of the dictionary also includes a list of dozens of common abbreviations, a second section on Spanish pronunciation, and how to express numbers, times, and dates in Spanish. I couldn't find a mention of how many words are actually in the dictionary, but the editorial review above says that there are 195,000 entries and translations, which should be enough for all but the most fluent speakers or those needing specialized vocabulary. There are facts on Spanish life and culture, although I haven't been able to figure out where in the dictionary that is yet, but it might have something to do with the boxes of text that are set apart from the rest of the text throughout the dictionary. These also appear in the English-to-Spanish portion of the dictionary, but curiously, they're in Spanish there too so it's hard to understand them unless you're fluent.

I also have the Collins electronic dictionary on CD, and it's excellent also. One thing that's nice about the CD-based one is it will pronounce the words for you. You have to install the pronunciation generator separately from the main dictionary, and I don't recall it asking about that during the initial installation, but anyway, it's there if you want it. Another advantage over a printed dictionary is lookup is almost instantaneous. You just start typing in the word and it pops to the place. Often you don't even need to type in the complete word. Another great feature of the electronic dictionary is that you can right click on any word in the definition section and it pops you to that definition in the text, which is great for going to a word that given as a synonym, or a word that you don't know when a phrase with the word is given.

One thing you'll notice about electronic dictionaries is all the color-coding and different colors used. I'm not sure if this is more of a distraction than a help so far, but anyway, it's the way they do it. This one uses at least six colors--light blue, dark blue, yellow, green, purple, and black. The way this works is the word you're looking up is in light blue, the abbreviation for the part of speech is in yellow, the phonetic pronunciation is in green, and the definition is in black. Dark blue seems to be used to state which verb form the word is from, or examples of usage, as the definition often includes phrases showing how the word is used. I'm still not sure what purple is for, but purple seems to denote similar words or synonyms, examples of Brit. or American usage, whether it's a specialized term, such as NAUT (nautical), and other things. The first word on a page at the top left of the program window is always in red, so that's all there is to that.

Collins maintains what it calls "word banks" of Spanish and English, which are electronic databases of over 400 million words of contemporary Spanish and English usage, and presumably this dictionary is based on that, and which Collins considers a valuable resource.

Rating:
Summary: Great learning tool
Review: I got this book before school started; I'm taking Spanish III. So I needed a dictionary. I opted for this one because it looked hefty enough.

I wasn't disappointed. This dictionary has enough words for any Spanish student. It even has modern words like "digital TV", "internet", and "MTV". It has easy to read print and is durable.

Whether you want to browse or seriously study this dictionary is great. Aside from defining the word, examples are given in context.

This dictionary also has a very extensive grammar section. This is a very important note. This section has everything you need to know Spanish grammar, which will help you in class much. It has all the common verbs, like hacer, ir, ser, dormir, etc. It also has sections devoted to translation problems, spelling, adjectives, pronouns, etc.

I carry this dictionary to class every day. It is invaluable in the moment when you forgot the meaning of a word. And if you know the meaning in English only, you can flip quickly to the English-Spanish section.

Some precautionary notes: This dictionary was made in Britain. Some English words are spelled differently from the American way (honour, colour, etc.). It also differs from most American dictionaries in that it contains vulgar words (I won't enumerate them, though). Also, this is a dictionary for Castillian Spanish. It probably won't have some Latin American terms.

In conclusion, this dictionary is my new amigo. I was thinking of getting an electronic spanish dictionary, but now I know that this is better. I get to actually see the words and see surrounding ones too. It's an interesting, pithy, concise dictionary. If you need a Spanish dictionary this one won't let you down.

Rating:
Summary: Good for its size
Review: This is a very good dictionary. I love the Harper Colllins dictionaries but this is the smallest one that I would recomend. Any dictionary with less words that this one is just to limited. The grammar section is good.(I an sure not the best judge on grammar) and the verb tables are priceless.