Customer Reviews

Random House Latin-American Spanish Dictionary

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When I first learned of this dictionary, I was very enthusiastic. Finally, I thought. Well, not quite, gringo. See, the problem is that most dictionaries are not written for the vast majority of English and Spanish speakers. They utilize British English and Spanish from Spain. This is immensely frustrating as anyone can tell you when they looked up a word only to find their Mexican or Chilean or Venezuelan friends looking at them quizzically because they'd never heard of it. We need a dictionary that employs American English and Latin American Spanish. Why is that so hard? There are more than a quarter billion Americans and several hundred million Latinos. WAY more than Spain and England together.

Regarding this dictionary, it is acceptable for beginners and intermediate users, but advanced speakers will find that it simply does not have enough words or idiomatic expressions. If you want a quick reference to look up words, it's fine. But if you are looking for a REFERENCE as in an exhaustive list of all expressions regarding poner (for example), then keep shopping. What kills me is it that if Random House took this dictionary, expanded and deepened it, it would rock the house. But as it stands now, it's limited in what it can do for most bilingual speakers.

I don't think there is really any reason to buy this dictionary. As a "regular" English-Spanish dictionary it is very incomplete, it is simply a list of words (in Spanish for the first half and (naturally) English in the second) with some counterparts in the other language; no indication of use, no indication on whether the word is a verb, noun, adjective, adverb... and for some words additional meanings are simply neglected. I bought it because I thought it was a dictionary of "Latin-American Spanish" and because as such I hoped it would contain words particular to each country in Latin America. Maybe this was hoping for too much, but it doesn't even contain some very common words used throughout all of Spanish speaking Latin-American countries. The author should have done more research.