Customer Reviews

Hippocrene Children's Illustrated Swedish: English-Swedish/Swedish-English (Hippocrene Children's Illustrated Foreign Language Dictionaries)

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This illustrated dictionary is a great tool for teaching children the Swedish words for objects and also for building the vocabulary of adults who are beginning Swedish.

The best thing about this book is that it gives the definitive form of all of the objects. It doesn't leave you wondering, as in some books, if a particular noun is an "en" word or an "ett" word.

For example, for "girl" it shows a picture of a girl, says "girl" in English and says "(en) flicka" in Swedish. So now you would know that if you wanted to say "a girl" in Swedish, you would say "en flicka." For "the girl" you would know to say add the "en" (for this case, it becomes just "n") to the end of "flicka" to get "flickan."

The pronounciation key in the front of the book is also very useful and the proper pronounciation is also found under each Swedish word.

I grew up here in the states by my mom who is from Sweden. I have wanted a book just like this for my classroom and have been able to teach the children in my class words of common objects. It has also helped me touch up on my Swedish vocabulary as well. This book is awesome. I love the fact that it has the pictures along with the object. The best part is the correct phonetic pronunciation that the author placed underneath each word.

This book is very nice and can even be useful for adult beginners, since it contains some fundamentals adult language books skip over.

Unfortunately, this book uses a very pungent, strong, petro-chemically based ink that gave me awful headaches. I wouldn't be surprised if the chemical vapors reeking out of this book might even be banned in Sweden.

I am severely chemically sensitive. I tried to gas it out by putting it near the heater for a few weeks but it wasn't enough.

To use this book, I had to put on a mask, cut this book cut off the binding, scan the pages into my computer, and print them out on my HP ink jet, which uses an innocuous ink that does not give me problems. I punched holes in that original pages and used one-inch ring binders for them, in case I need to copy it again. I will store it away. The copy I made for using with my child will go into a regular report binder.

It upsets me that most children's books use such toxic inks. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that with their developing minds, they can be effected by "second hand" chemical vapors. Forget about the "war on" cancer, alzheimers, etc. How about the "war on" stuff like this that may cause hormone imbalances?

Many publications use plant-based ink and they don't bother me. It looks the same but it is not toxic.

After a year, the toxic ink "gassed out" and we can now read the original book.