Customer Reviews

Farsi-English/English-Farsi (Persian) Concise Dictionary (Hippocrene Concise Dictionary) (Persian Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I would not recommend buying this as a dictionary; especially, not if it is to be a desk reference or a primary source. If you are looking for a handy word list (8400 entries split about evenly; I'd give it an extra star as a word list.) that will fit in your briefcase or book bag, then it is serviceable. I am 6 months into studying Farsi and have found a couple of errors, have been bothered by some of the usage and feel that getting the alphabet out of order (nan, he, vav, ye) is really bad form in a dictionary. I still use it because of the handy size and it was cheap, after all. Also, this - and the other review of disappointment - speak to why publishers should use Amazon's 'see inside this book' feature. I now need a good dictionary but I am reluctant to buy without at least knowing number of entries - if not style.

This is an abysmal work. There are many redundancies, and multiple entries of the same word. Also it appears that the author has often used Arabic words when the most common word used by Iranians would be a Farsi word. I have the impression that the author must be more comfortable in Arabic than he is in either Farsi or certainly English. The "Small Planet" Farsi phrasebook has a better dictionary by far in its 60-odd page dictionary section than this whole book.

This dictionary not only has horrible editing, it has instances of using the wrong words! There are no examples of how the words are used, and there are plethora typoes- I counted three on one page before I had to close the dictionary. No, this is a poor dictionary in which to invest.

Good for getting the basic words but not much help in finding variations of root words. Linguists or native speakers will find this dictionary very frustrating.

It is not laid out in the fashion necessary for Farsi script and has no variations on any words. In fact, the only information given is the Persian/Farsi word, pronuciation, English word and Eglish pronunciation. I would never have purchased this dictionary had I known this.

This dictionary isn't perfect, but it's a good start. Its advantages are that it has each Persian word written in both a Roman transliteration as well as the original Arabic script, its layout is fairly straightforward, and according to a Persian friend of mine, the words included are fairly typical. He also said that it's well suited for what I needed it for, but stressed that it's for beginners. The only thing I could see as an improvement to this book is that it include a cue to the meaning of the translations for words with one-to-many translations. For example, the English word lie has two meanings (synonyms with recline and deceive), but if you look up lie in this book, you will get two entries, with no indication as to which one means which.

If I had known what was in this book before I bought it, I would still have bought it. It was affordable and is worth its price, but it's not going to be my last dictionary.

This book is never much use to me, because half the time, the word I want isn't in it, and when the word is present, you get no clues as to the particular usage. For example if you looked up the word "store" you wouldn't know which entry meant "shop..a noun" or which entry meant "to put something away.. a verb" both meanings would just appear side by side with no clues whatsoever. Its basically worthless.

This dictionary is not valuable to the beginner of Persian/Farsi because it merely gives quick glosses rather than full definitions. Because of the scant glosses, the student will not be able to find correct or appropriate definitions for a large number of words listed in the dictionary. It also fails to give the learner enough grammatical information for it to be a useful dictionary.

I have studied about 9 different languages over the past 10 years, and I've found that a good dictionary is the most essential tool for any language learner. Don't begin your study of Persian/Farsi with a tool that, in my opinon, is not worth the paper it's printed on.

I have never seen so useless a pocket dictionary. During my visit in Iran, I almost never fond any of the day-to-day words I was looking for, instead I got "perspiration", "indigenious", and "chahaarnal raftan". It's simply a word list with one translation to each post and its word class. No phrases, not even a list of numerals.

This is a good book on this subject. But, I'd like to suggest a very good source of Persian (Farsi) books on the net: www.iranibook.com & www.iranibookshop.com You will find any Farsi books in this feild

I like the way it is laid out and the use of phonetic spelling for Farsi speakers but I found that it was missing some words, such as 'khojaste' and 'baad' (not wind).