Customer Reviews

The New Bantam-Megiddo Hebrew & English Dictionary (English and Hebrew Edition)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The Hebrew letters are very small, fuzzy, smudgy, and painful to read. The difference between a gimel and a nun can be impossible to see, chaf and bet confused, even heh and hhet are hard to pick apart. I need a huge magnifier and a good deal of luck to get a result. It's a shame because the dictionary contains a large number of words. Keep looking and skip this one. It will become plant food at my house once I find a replacement.

This dictionary contains many listings, but is somewhat limited in the definitions. It is also confusing in the grammar sections and in the English to Hebrew definitions. It is nice for a quick reference if you're not looking for detailed definitions.

I recommend this dictionary to students of Hebrew. I find it better than Zilberman, and Ben Yehuda is full of mistakes. For a paperback size book its coverage is very good.

It's true it's from 1975, but doesn't seem to matter.

(...)

I have used this dictionary for years. It is handy and quick. Its definitions are not really extensive, and it does not give you sample sentences, and illustrations of diverse usage. But it is quick and largely accurate, and most often very helpful.

this dictionary is excellent for quick references to words. I primarily use it when I am reading old testament biblical texts. It is easy for me to speedily find any word without the lengthy details of a lexicon. It is lightweight and portable. For most words, it only gives one definition, but it is outstanding for quick reference. I have never come across a word I was looking for and could not find it

This dictionary is very practical, quick and mobile. You can put in your bag and go around with. It is an indispensable tool for Hebrew learners, beginners and medium level.

I am a native speaker in both Hebrew and English so my usage of the dictionary may be biased towards the less frequent words. That said, I cannot recall a single instance when I looked up a word in this dictionary and found a proper translation. In those few cases where a translation was available (and those were few indeed) it was terse and incoherent. This dictionary is completely useless to anyone beyond a total novice and even a beginner may want more comprehensive translations than what is begin offered.
There are much better dictionaries on the market and there is no reason to waste money on this one.

As a student learning Hebrew, I have been looking for a small, cheap, concise dictionary that is easy to carry around, yet has every definition in it that I will need. After looking through about a dozen dictionaries, this is the one I chose. I prefer it over all the others for a few reasons. First, as I mentioned earlier, it has every word which I have needed to look up. Other dictionaries I looked at were thicker, but didn't have the definitions I needed. Second, it is very cheap. Only seven dollars for something of this quality! You can't find a deal like that with many other dictionaries! And last, it is the perfect size to carry around with you when you travel. Sure, it won't fit in your pocket; but you can keep it in your car, your purse, or any other bag you may be carrying around!

My only issue is that it lists verbs in the past tense, when I prefer looking them up in their infinitive rather than having to conjugate them into past tense first. I used this dictionary for about a year, so it's nice for looking up non-verbs. I eventually bought a different dictionary directly from Israel, though.

I used this book when I was a beginner and I recently bought a new copy because the old one fell apart after a few years of carrying it around. The book is a bit flimsy, made of newsprint so the pages can rip easily and the cover and spine start to weaken after a while. But I can't complain about that too much because the price is quite low.

I never had any problems with the print quality. I just flipped through it now and I could see the difference between nun's and gimel's with no trouble.

Sometimes the word I try to look up isn't in the dictionary. That's frustrating, but pocket dictionaries are always limited in scope. Any serious student should have a heavy duty hardcover dictionary to refer to whenever the pocket dictionary fails.

A dictionary with example sentences is always much more useful than one without, and this dictionary doesn't have any. That is a shortcoming. A good one with example sentences is the Oxford English-Hebrew/Hebrew-English dictionary (available in both hardcover and paperback).

This one dictionary is probably not enough for studying Hebrew, but for a cheap pocket dictionary it does the trick. I always carried this cheap one around with me and left my hardcover treasures at home.