Customer Reviews

The Concise Oxford-Duden German Dictionary

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I LIVE AND STUDIED IN GERMANY BUT CAME FROM THE UNITED STATES. THIS IS THE ONLY DICTIONARY YOU WILL EVER NEED FOR GERMAN GRAMMAR CLASSES AND THE BIGGER EDITION (Oxford Duden) IS THE MOST COMPLETE DICTIONARY FOR HOME AND OFFICE USE. Forget all the rest. Dictionaries like Langenscheidt, Cassell, and Pons no longer reflect the most accurate and sophisticated way of speaking both German and English. Some still contain the unreformed German spelling. Some even have phrases my German professor cant understand and is amused at ! Some contain word translations that cant ``hit the nail on the head'', the student ends up talking in synonyms and translations are awful. Some synonyms that are provided by other dictionaries are as far from each other as the swing of a pendulum (once you reach professional level). The professors of linguistics here in Germany recommend this to English speakers, TO HELP THE STUDENT ACCURATELY TRANSLATE -the big bulky Oxford Duden dictionary (GroßWorterbuch) which is THE BEST EVER FOR HOME AND OFFICE USE, and this middle-sized one (The Concise Oxford Duden German Dictionary). You cant make a mistake with the partnership of these 2 publishing houses - Oxford and Duden (a partnership of one of the best English universities and a German publishing giant - those are the 2 countries that speak English and German! ). WHen I was studying Professional German, this concise one and the bigger Duden Oxford helped me a lot and my word translations were almost always accurate. My classmates kept borrowing my dictionary till the professor picked it up and asked everyone else to order it. I only had to improve on my grammar (conjugations, adjective declinations, genitive vs. accusative, etc.) DONT BUY ANY OTHER BRAND. Trust me. I studied and I am now teaching and I have thrown other dictionaries (no plurals, no du form, expressions are outdated and no longer in use in modern Germany, spellings have been changed under the reform law, etc.) and WORSE when you translate from other dictionaries, a professional German is amused because it sounds so funny. Save yourself the misery of awful translations that cant be understood in Germany. Langenscheidt is written (from the viewpoint/mind of a German native speaker, so each word is directly translated), BUT WHEN AN ENGLISH SPEAKER TRANSLATES, HE THINKS IN THE STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE WHICH IS HIS MOTHER TONGUE. Hence, an English speaker will wrongly translate when using Langenscheidt because the word order and grammar of the English mind is not the same as a structured, detailed German mind. You should use a dictionary THAT THINKS THE WAY YOU DO (if you speak English- get an Oxford one). No other dictionary beats Oxford Duden if you are an English native speaker. THe second best for me is HarperCollins, if you cant find this.

I am currently living in Germany, and this is my go-to dictionary for every day questions. I chose this dictionary after examining several because of the complete entries (lots of semantic/idiomatic variety), the Oxford/Duden name and the use of IPA transcription. I haven't been disappointed.

One thing that I really like is that it qualifies entries thoroughly and bilingually, so you know exactly what is meant. For example, one of the entries for "doctor" reads "(coll.) (falsify) verf?lschen [Dokumente, Tonb?nder]; frisieren (ugs.) [Bilanzen, B?cher]" In this way, it provides a lot of information about the use and meaning of the word in both languages. Definitely a plus when you're dealing with nuance, but I can see how this might be a bit too much info for a beginner. (If you just ignore these extra bits, you'll be in the same boat as a simpler dictionary which doesn't offer this depth in the first place.)

This dictionary is also generally good at offering both American/British spellings/pronunciations/meanings and High German/dialectal (esp. Southern) variations. One thing that repeatedly annoys me, though, and this is getting really picky now, but I hate that the irregular verb charts are at the back of the book, rather than between the two halves.