Customer Reviews

NTC's Compact Finnish and English Dictionary

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As a student of Finnish with no prior experience, NTC's Finnish-English-Finnish dictionary provided me with a practical source for thousands of English-Finnish translations of common words. Because Finnish is of no gramatical relation to English, many of the words at times end in long suffixes. If the user of this dictionary wishes to translate word-for-word English sentences to Finnish sentences, the resulting sentence may not be understood by a Finnish speaker, as many times whole Finnish sentences end up being a single, excruciatingly long jumble of case endings. All in all, this dictionary is worth the money for someone who wishes to use it to translate single words. However, for a person who wishes to simply use this dictionary to create whole sentences, the "Teach Yourself" course in Finnish (along with the cassettes) is recomended, so as to give the user an understanding of the syntax of this complicated, yet worthwhile language.

There is simply no more in it than in a pocket dictionary, which, considering the size and price of this book, is definitely not good enough. Serious students of Finnish would be better off with, for example, the Standard Finnish Dictionary (Finnish-English English-Finnish), published by Continuum in London and widely used in Finland. Athough it will cost you a little more, it will give you more far more information and much better coverage of the language.