Customer Reviews

Icelandic-English, English-Icelandic Dictionary (Hippocrene Concise Dictionary)

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

 

 

This book was small, which fooled me into thinking it would be an indispensable pocket resource, packed with small type and tens of thousands of definitions. It's not.

Each page contains one column of text with rather large type, so the book simply doesn't contain much information. Many common words used in normal conversation were just missing.

Irregular forms of words weren't included on a large scale, requiring the reader to have pretty extensive knowledge of roots and how they may change irregularly depending on the case. Something like "this the plural dative form of word X" would be extremely useful with a language like Icelandic, but was almost completely absent from this book.

Nouns were listed with gender, but the book didn't say whether the nouns were weak or strong.

Another frustrating feature of this book was the inconsistent alphabetical ordering of words when non-roman characters like aelig, thorn, and eth were involved.

Other features missing from this book but present in some other dictionaries: Common phrases, basic grammar, conversational snippets.

Overall, this book is just too frustrating to be useful.

.
This is a very small dictionary with just one column of large type on each page. There are 177 pages in the Icelandic-English section, so you can guess that there are in truth, not many words.

When you're doing a simple translation from English to Icelandic, this isn't too much of a problem, because if you're a native English speaker, you can always find a substitute word if you can't find the one you really wanted in this little dictionary.

But when it's the other way around, it's a big, big problem. To test it, I downloaded the daily free newspaper in Icelandic from the Morgunblağiğ website, and attempted to translate some simple articles using this dictionary. Barely one in ten of the words used in the newspaper were in the dictionary.

So for that, it was useless.

You may find it more useful if you're good at recognising the irregular declensions, or at splitting compound words into their components, but even then, I think you will find that this dictionary simply doesn't have the vocabulary. In fact, it barely meets the definition of a dictionary.

Think of it as an expanded phrase book and you'll be nearer the mark but then, it doesn't contain any phrases.

Unfortunately, there isn't much else on the market unless you can get something from Iceland itself which would be expensive. If you really need to translate even the simplest of texts, this book won't do.

Most people who study Icelandic, buy this little book, but it's absolutely useless, because:

*1. It contains too few words.

Only 5,000 one way (a good dictionairy should contain at least 50,000).

*2. There are no inflection indications.

The most essential thing of the whole Icelandic language lacks (only gender is stated, and the strength of verbs, which is absoutely useless without other information).

*3. No word combinations, no proverbs whatsoever.

Needed for a good use of the language.

*4. Old-fashioned.

No modern words.

--------------

The problem is, THERE ARE NO OTHER ICELANDIC DICTIONAIRIES AVAILABLE ON AMAZON. ...I hope I have helped you.

I bought this dictionary before going to Iceland for a year as an exchange student. It was useful for the very, very basics...sometimes. I found it frustrating when I couldn't find words in it that I commonly heard in conversation. The lack of cross-references, as noted by another reviewer, serves only to make the book smaller and more useless. If you really want a useful dictionary, do what I did and buy one in Iceland.

The demand for Icelandic dictionaries is pretty small. Because of this, you will have to pay 60 dollars or more for a great or out-of-print edition. The hippocrene version is not a great dictionary by any stretch of the imagination, however, it retails for around 10 dollars. If you are serious about learning Icelandic, you will need a dictionary. Pick this one up and use the glossaries from you other books (such as Teach Yourself Icelandic, Colloquial Icelandic, Icleandic, etc...) to supplement what this edition leaves out. The other reviewers seem to have alot of money, which explains their disdain for this cheap edition and absurdly expensive recommendations. Which one would you choose: a brand new $10 dictionary or a $60+ out-of-print dictionary. Just be sure to check Half Price Books and other used bookstores to see if they happen to have any large college or complete Icelandic dictionaries in stock.

As a lover of the Icelandic Language myself, I decided to buy this book to help me understand this ancient viking language, but the truth is it doesn't. When writing text in Icelandic, as I must do for my Icelandic class it is helpful with some words. However, this book produces extremely little help with pronunciation, and no help in the grammatical aspects, it provides a jole of words, yet not enough. It's a good reference to have and exciting to skim, but when using the spoken word of this language the book produces little or no help at all. In conclusion, it is nice small book that's quite handy...yet hardly. :o|

While of handy size, and usable by linguaphiles who rely on various alternatives for locating words in dictionaries, this dictionary falls disappointingly short with regards to cross reference (e.g. "björn" and "hreindır" appear in the Icelandic side, but "bear" and "reindeer" are absent from the English side).

I don't know the background of the nay-sayers of this little gem, but it's a pocket-style dictionary. DUH!

Anybody who's used pocket-dictionaries knows that they are limited in capacity.

Me, I use this to look up the English - Icelandic and then go over to Zoega's to look up the Old Norse version of the modern Icelandic. It usually gets me in the ballpark.

I am self-teaching Old Norse so I can create more accurate "Rune" stones for SCA awards for Norse personas. While my Old Norse isn't perfect, it's gotten a lot better with this nice, POCKET sized dictionary.

This dictionary is better than what most of the other reviewers have said. It is not a big dictionary, it has 177 pages, and it only has one column of print, but it has many words in it. Someone said it still uses the letter z, which Icelandic no longer uses. But I did not see the letter z in the Icelandic section.

This is not a great dictionary, but it will go along just fine with other books' glossaries.

Although the earliest date in the book is 1990, a little bit of knowledge of the language will reveal a number of anomalies in spelling and word choice that clearly date the book as much older. On the lcelandic side, there is at least occasional use of the letter 'z' in words such as Şızkaland (Germany), which according to wikipedia at least (URL excluded per guidelines, but search for "Icelandic Language") indicates that the reference to that spelling dates from before 1974, at which time the letter 'z' was removed from the language. On the English side, spellings such as 'to-day' and 'to-morrow' also seem to date the book as being much older than even the 1970s. Even the appearance of the text and the distinction in the printing between the bulk of the book and the last few pages seem to indicate an older text.

That said, it's not useless as a reference, but as others have noted, it is quite limited. I don't have occasion to test whether the translations it provides are as archaic as I expect they might be -- imagine someone speaking to you now in English as it was spoken in the 30s or 40s, for example -- but for a beginner it does fill in some of the gap that would otherwise require a much more expensive dictionary costing at least 10x as much. In that vein, it is a "you get what you pay for" product to me. I use it, but get somewhat limited use out of it.