Customer Reviews

The Firefly Five Language Visual Dictionary: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian (English, Spanish and French Edition)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am a teacher of foreign languages and own a number of visual dictionaries, including the Firefly Five Language Dictionary, the Firefly Spanish/English Dictionary, the Firefly Mini Spanish/English Dictionary, and the DK Five Language Visual Dictionary. I prefer the Firefly dictionaries because they tactfully include the gender of words as a superscript after the word rather than as an indirect article, as in the DK dictionary. The latter has the ill-effect of creating ambiguous genders in instances where the indirect article is truncated:

For example: garlic - l'ail - der Knoblauch - el ajo - l'aglio

The size of this hardcover edition make it more appropriate for use as a desk dictionary rather than a pocket edition. The Firefly Five Language Dictionary contains almost twice as many pages and words as the Firefly Spanish/English Visual Dictionaries. Given that the image layouts used in all of the Firefly dictionaries are from a common master, the page count is a very good indication of the word count. The faint of heart may want to consider getting a bilingual version in order to avoid confusion between languages. Although words are consistently listed in the five languages in the same order, it can still be overwhelming and confusing at times when words are very similar across languages.

As with any visual dictionary, this one focuses on nouns. Students of the Spanish will still want to have a quality pocket bilingual dictionary.

Discovered this wonderful, fun book in the home of a relative living in France. If you are a lover of languages (European at any rate) it will amaze and delight you. It is not suitable for learners of the said languages as it only has nouns but I have never seen such a comprehensive collection of detailed words and phrases ranging from the components of a car to many different kinds of fruit. I spent several happy hours just browsing. Cannot understand why it is not a best seller all over Europe!

I would re-purchase this item if I lost it. I found it to be a great help and found some dispointments as well. This picture dictonary is complete; more than I needed with terms that I would never need to know. The picture dictonary is very thick therefore it's spine fragile and is not ideal to take commuting. There are many terms that would not normal be used in daily conversions; making the dictonary harder to rifle through for high frequence words. I did like how the terms were filed over the picture in a order that does not change from English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian with gender article markers. Other than it's size the only other complaint I have about it is that it only list nouns.

This book is excellent for those persons whom work in multi-language settings. This book is not designed to teach a given language rather to teach job specific nouns. (i.e. To teach a mechanic the names of all the minute engine parts.) It gives nouns that would not be found in traditional dictionaries, and it can be a bit overwhelming due to its extensiveness.

This is the ultimate visual dictionary and in five languages too. 6,000 color pictures illustrate the meaning of 35,000 terms in English, Spanish, French, German and Italian. I love this book! Has almost everything you could think of in it. Yes, it has only nouns but i would still get it. It really helps me learn words easier when i have a picture to go with it. The pictures almost look real at times even though i know they are digitally rendered.
The items are placed in categories which are color coded and also has indexes in all five languages.

The categories are as follows:

*Astronomy
*Earth
*Vegetable Kingdom
*Animal Kingdom
*Human Being
*Food and Kitchen
*House
*Do-it-yourself and Gardening
*Clothing
*Personal Adornment and Articles
*Arts and Architecture
*Communications and Office Automation
*Transport and Machinery
*Energy
*Science
*Society
*Sports and Games


Such a wonderful visual dictonary for most anybody!

The book shows great artwork with words in each of the five languages. We recently had guests from Europe, and it was a great reference for items that have many individual parts, e.g. cars or washing machines.

This is a must-have for those who are willing to know the correct name of things instead of giving that always extemporized description that, sometimes, goes nowhere. Excellent book for the children, for the language learner and for anybody who looks for an educational yet fun way to improve vocabulary. It is very well organized into topics and its respective variations and has crystal-clear pictures as well, which is a plus in comparison to other visual dictionaries that is based mostly on drawings. Worth the money.

This book is awe inspiring. I have never been so amazed by a purchase before. The two most amazing things about it are: it's astonishingly high quality, and it's astonishingly reasonable price. If you want to see beautiful, highly detailed, full-color pictures of nearly all the every-day objects in our world, from parts of the body to types of fishes, animals and birds, sumo wrestlers, fire fighters, household items, manufacturing machinery, computers, clothes ... these are just random selections from over 900 pages. Each picture is labeled in all 5 languages, most pictures are further analyzed into parts, which are also labeled. What it is NOT: it is not lightweight; it is not a travel companion; It is not for people who just want to learn one or two hundred words of a foreign language. It IS for people who really like to know the names of lots of detailed items (many of which I don't even know yet in English) in English, Spanish, French, German, and/or Italian. 5 stars isn't enough. This is a *spectacular* buy.

The current edition is such a disappointment. The book itself is smaller (instead of being 8x11) and the type is much smaller. It is very difficult to read especially since the page is cluttered with five languages rather than just English. Please lobby the publisher to bring back the previous larger edition with its clean layout. It *could* be such a great teaching tool but is too frustrating for beginning readers in its present state. I wish I had bought it before it went out of print :(

I currently have this book checked out from the library. This is an incredible reference source; I cannot begin to imagine how much time and effort the research team put into it. This is not merely a picture dictionary that shows, for example, a photo of a toilet and gives you the translation for "toilet"; it displays a detailed diagram of a toilet and translates the name of many of its parts and components. This exhaustive approach means that I often didn't know the English term for a subject, such as the many components of a shipping container or the names for exotic vegetables. Perhaps you, too will learn not only foreign words, but many English words as well!

It is pretty pricey, but that's the cost for such extensive detail and professional quality. Certainly check with your library first.