Customer Reviews

Norwegian-English/English-Norwegian Dictionary

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I purchased this book before leaving and studying Norwegian intensively for a year. Now that I am in Norway I need to use the book quite frequently, but find many faults with it. It seems to be much more tailored to the Norwegian than to the native English speaker. For instance, gender is left out of the dictionary though this is quite important to know. Also, many common words and phrases are not given. I would recommend that one try another dictionary.

The only thing that this book does well is obfuscate the Norwegian language. It is lacking both in completeness and clarity in almost every one of its features. This list of irregular verbs is not only severely incomplete (leaving out one of the most commonly used verbs: to have), the participle form of those verbs that are listed is left out. Gender is listed, but the book does not distinguish between masculine and feminine (grouping both into the "common gender") without distinguishing the words that must be used in the feminine. That is only a short list of the problems with this book. Hippocrene books owes us an explanation.

I bought this book to help me communicate with a friend from Norway, she cannot understant half of it !

My Norwegian friend tells me the translations it uses are rather formal. Indeed for some words she says it borders on archaic. The lack of gender information and limited information on irregular verbs also really hurt this dictionary. But hey the cover's nice.

This dictionary is a photocopy of an older dictionary, probably out of copyright restriction. Its age shows on every page, and almost all definition articles.

Hippocrene has the reputation of producing cheap book cheaply. It does not have a reputation of producing QUALITY foreign language material. AVOID this book and everything else published by Hippocrene.