Customer Reviews

NTC's Dictionary of Everyday American English Expressions (McGraw-Hill ESL References)

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I strongly recommend this book for those who (especially, international students, businessmen and tourists) would like to understand American spoken English and express themselves using American spoken English. All the everyday expressions are arranged according to the real situation. You can learn everyday expressions very effectively by reading and using this excellent book!

I found this book very useful for someone who wants to increase his conversational skills in a short period. You can find lots of expressions organized by topic. It is helpful in the sense that there are words with which you were acquainted at some point, and this book serves to refresh your memory of some forgotten expressions. It's just like entering data to your brain. This book is not intended to entertain you; it is rather in the form of a dictionary, and reading a dictionary is no fun. But if your ultimate goal is to broaden your expressions, this book is an excellent tool.

If you have the basic knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary, this book is definitely for you. The first complex phrase that I dared to speak in front of the native English speaker was from this book. The questions that I asked frequently in the public were from this book. The topics that we talked a lot were also from this book. Even I learned some very useful phrases from this book for flirting with the people who I like and turning the people who I dislike down in chat-room. This is a must-have book for the learner of English.

This is an extremely useful dictionary for an English as Second Language learner like me that has okay vocabulary and speaking ability but often doesn't know exactly how to express myself under some contexts. The dictionary cover mundane topics like "placing a telephone order for pizza", but I don't see that as drawbacks. Quite on the contrary, the book becomes so useful right because the topics and approriate expressions are very handy and can be applied everyday!

This book contains a lot of expressions, indeed. Some of which are more common than others. Although, beware that unless your American English is very basic, a lot of these expressions you are likely to already be familiar with. Many expressions are also almost identical, with just a different word order, or one or two words replaced. To give an example, the book gives you the following three suggestions (among others) to express that you feel cool or cold: "Turn on the heat", "Turn up the heat", "Turn the heat up".

With that in mind, I would still say the book is worth its price. I just think that the author could have left out a lot of variations of the expressions and saved some pages.

I am a native English speaker, and don't think I'd bother purchasing something like this . But, I recently had a friend visiting from overseas, and he came across this book while shopping at a local book store. He purchased it for himself, and after looking through it, I was very impressed. There are a couple of outdated expressions that might cause people to do a double-take if they heard them, but for the most part, the book does a great job of listing many relevant phrases. I was so impressed that I purchased another copy to send to another friend overseas who loves learning English.

One improvement that could be made is a better organizational system. The index is ok, but not great. It's good for finding new phrases to express certain feelings or ideas, but not for seeing if unusual expressions are already listed. I recall upsetting a former boyfriend for calling him "crabby" one day. With this dictionary, there is no way to look up the word crabby and see what it means in casual English. For that reason, I think a digital version of this book would be preferable.

i found this book honestly not very useful, i mean, the context, and the purpose of this book is not clear, if they were trying to teach us how to speak in some basic places, they had to teach by writing a vocabulary list for each situation, not sentences, you can't apply them everytime in a daily life, but some works, i'm okay with that,but generally i perefer a vocabulary builder for that,...