Customer Reviews

McGraw-Hill's German Student Dictionary (McGraw-Hill Dictionary Series)

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Buyer beware! This dictionary will not function as a "default dictionary" on the Kindle. Despite the vague promise in the Kindle 2 User Manual "you can also purchase other dictionaries and make them your default dictionary using the Settings page," none of the foreign language dictionaries currently available in the Kindle store provide this essential functionality. It is a true pleasure to read foreign language materials using a linked dictionary, and the Mobipocket Reader has flawlessly provided this capability for over 10 years. Nonetheless, this is not yet available on the Kindle for unknown reasons. I encourage other interested people to contact the Kindle development team, as I have, and plead with them to provide high quality foreign language default dictionaries as soon as possible.

I bought this despite the "Buyer Beware" post by another reviewer thinking that, although this couldn't be used as a default dictionary in the Kindle (2), I could at least use the Search function of the Kindle to lookup German words in the dictionary. Turns out that this doesn't work like one would expect.

Example: type in "Buch" (the german word for book)and click find...

What you get are 26 Search Results. In essence every hit on the word Buch in the order it is found in the dictionary. The word is used in illustrative sentences in the definitions for other words. In this case, the first hit for Buch is actually found in the definition for Absatz (the german word for paragraph).

If you think you're going to be able to use this dictionary as a lookup tool, think again.

I agree with the previous reviewer that Amazon is guilty of bait and switch here. The Kindle user manual gives instructions for setting default dictionaries, but when you attempt to follow those instructions, you are thwarted by the function not being available on the Kindle. Perhaps some day Mr. Bezos will see to hit that his vision for the Kindle is fully implemented, but that day is not today.

Do not buy ANY dictionary for the Kindle. You will be disappointed unless you like reading dictionaries from front to back in page order. You cannot "look up" words.

As for this particular dictionary: It's a basic new student version of an English-German dictionary. The hard copy is probably as useful as any beginner's dictionary. But if you're buying if for the Kindle, Kaveat Emptor...

This is not useable on the Kindle. No easy way to navigate to a word. So far, the easiest way that I have found is to guess at a location to go to, determine a beter location to go to, <repeat until you get close to the actual word> Search may find 200 locations for a word so it is virtually useless for any but the more unusual words. Don't buy this unless you really like to read through a dictionary.

I try to use this with my kindle. This is the worst dictionary I ever had. Most of the words I was looking for was missing and there is no German-English translation. Maybe it is in hardcover good but not on the kindle.

Should have been explicitly listed as not suitable for using as a primary dictionary. Useless. I can look things up in a paper book much much faster

This review is for the physical book, NOT the Kindle. After looking at many beginner German / English Dictionaries I decided on this one because the pronunciations for both languages are phonetically spelled out instead of hard-to-read symbols, heiroglyphics and gobbledigook. I can look at how Germans would pronounce English words and then cross-reference them in order to help pronounce German words. This is a good resource to accompany beginning German language studies.

I saw at once that the main attraction of McGraw-Hill's German Student Dictionary would be the set of sentences used to illustrate the entries. And so it is. Having a set of 1883 sound, idiomatically correct and wieldable German sentences is no small attraction. An excellent way to make use of them is to put them into Interlex in groups of ten and then test yourself until responses are pin perfect. The retentivity of this learning method compares favorably with other vocabulary acquisition methods I am aware of.

Nits are always available to be picked. There is a suspiciously high inclusion of things French, as if the French translation set were the original, and the German, Spanish, and Italian versions knock-offs. I counted eleven typos in the D-E direction, all but one easily spotted. And there are a (very) few disconcerting time warps, like the reference to the long defunct Concorde.

Physically, the book is hefty, with pages of substantial acid-free stock, and a binding so stiff as to defy practical use. Cutting the book in half helps, as does (no joke) cutting free and trimming the individual pages. There! Now I have something I can work with. However, (joke) the page liberation approach does reduce the book's resale value.