untitled





Advice on Buying a Dictionary


from University of Michigan What follows is merely my (Hartmut's*) opinion: you may well find other German teachers who will denounce what you are about to read as the sort of ludicrous insanity that can only be cured by acupuncture or Gestalt therapy. So please take this advice with a grain of salt!


General Advice
Whatever dictionary you buy, you should absolutely do the following three things:

  1. Read the instructions in the front telling you how the dictionary is organized: how does it list plural forms?  How does it list irregular verbs?  How does it organize its entries?
  2. Once you have looked up a word in the German-English section, look it up in the English-German section (and vice-versa) to avoid misunderstandings.  Use the clues to the different senses of the word given in the dictionary--and use your common sense!  Then you won't find yourself saying "Dattel" when you mean a "date" on the weekend, or "Arbeitshose" for "overall" when you don't mean "work pants" :)  Note that in the German-English section, the clues to the various senses of the word tend to be in cryptic German, but they're still very much worth attending to if you have the time.
  3. Don't overuse the dictionary.  If you're trying to understand something, only look up words if you can't make a reasonable guess.  If you're trying to write or say something, consider first whether you could express your idea in a different way using the vocabulary you know before you look up a word or expression.  Puritan guilt culture may have conditioned you to look up every single word you're unsure of--but in fact, you should feel guilty if you do look up everything, because you'll learn less, lose sight of the overall picture, and learning German will feel like a chore instead of a pleasure.
    4. Size and Price
    Bigger dictionaries will of course generally be more comprehensive, but the bigger the dictionary, the less likely you are to carry it with you and to actually use it when you need it.  I'd recommend that the first dictionary you get be a paperback in the $12-$15 price range, with about 100,000 entries.  Later, if you can afford a bigger dictionary to keep at home, that's great.

    Recommendations

    Warnings (i.e. I wouldn't buy these)

    Electronic Dictionaries

    The following information summarizes an email I received from an English teacher in Israel who is proficient in German:

    *Author of the article. I am not Hartmut.
    Web Hosting · Blog · Guestbooks · Message Forums · Mailing Lists
    Allwebco Web Templates · Build your own toolbar · Accept Credit Cards · Audio, Fonts, Clipart
    powered by a free webtools company bravenet.com