Customer Reviews

The Oxford Starter German Dictionary: Help Every Step of the Way (Oxford Starter Dictionaries)

First, the stress of words is not marked at all. German is full of words (such as Matrose) which have stress in unusual places and the beginner gets no help here and could even learn to pronounce the word wrongly.

Second, non-standard pronunciation of words is not marked either (such as die Chance), so the beginner gets no help in how the word should sound.

Finally, many words have a single translation which leaves the beginner clueless as to what is really meant: Die Mündung=mouth, but what kind of mouth? Turns out this means the 'mouth of a river', not an animal mouth (Maul) or a human mouth (Mund).

The 'Oxford Color German Dictionary Plus' is a mutch better dictionary for a dollar more.

This dictionary is actually a 'word list', meaning a list of words that you can count on being more or less necessary to understand German. The editors have taken the trouble to present the reader with a list which, if entirely memorized, will make you fairly competent in terms of minimum vocabulary.

That is its main value. This dictionary is the first thing you should be memorizing if you are serious about German. But you'll need a second dictionary to make sense of this one.