Customer Reviews

Milet Bilingual Visual Dictionary: English-Vietnamese

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This bilingual dictionary is awful and mostly useless. I give it 2 stars because at least the words are properly translated, as my Vietnamese-speaking friend has assured me. However, even though the translations are fine, most of the vocabulary is rather useless in everyday speech. For instance, you see that insect on the front cover? A few pages are devoted entirely to describing body parts of an insect, in English as well as the other language (in my case, Vietnamese). I looked at the diagrams and thought, "What the heck?", because most native English speakers don't even know the specific body parts of a butterfly! And unless you're an entomologist, which I'm sure readers of the intended age (4-8) are not, you're not going to need to know words like that.

Of course, there are pages with useful words. One example of a helpful group of pages I read in here was illustrations and English-Vietnamese translations of fruits and vegetables. But while that list was comprehensive, the book showed so many uncommon fruits and vegetables (e.g. an Indian fig) that would probably be useless for a young bilingual student to know. In place of all these seldom-used words, this bilingual dictionary should have devoted more time to everyday objects, and a couple of verbs and adjectives.

If you're looking for a bilingual dictionary, please don't get this book! A much better choice is Word by Word Picture Dictionary: English Vietnamese Edition or any books in the "Word BY Word" series.