Customer Reviews

Random House Webster's Pocket Portuguese Dictionary (Best-Selling Random House Webster's Pocket Reference)

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

 

 

I compared this pocket dictionary with the much larger Larousse Portuguese-English, English-Portuguese Dictionary and found that the small pocket Random House often offers much better translations. For example, Larousse translates "naftalina" as "naphthaline" (not very helpful!), while the Random House gives "moth balls." Larousse says that "namoro" is "relationship" (leading the reader to think that it could be any relationship), while Random House translates it as "going steady" (much clearer!). Meter o nariz in Larousse is "to stick one's nose in" (which it what it literally means), but Random House gives "to meddle" (much more concise and to the point). For narigudo Larousse tells us "with a large nose," but Random House gives us an adjective we can put in a sentence: big-nosed. For narcotráfico, Larousse gives "drug traffic" while Random House gives "drug smuggling" (I find the latter easier to understand). All in all, a bargain at $6.95, and small enough to carry in your vest pocket. Congratulations to the author, Bobby J. Chamberlain, at the University of Pittsburgh.

I'm a freelance Portuguese-to-English translator and consider myself quite proficient in Brazilian Portuguese. On that basis, I can only offer praise for this dictionary. It's wonderfully comprehensive, as good as dictionaries that are physically much bulkier. It's delightful to find, in a work this size, words such as "chafurdar" (to wallow in the mud). I used this dictionary on a recent trip while reading Bernardo Carvalho's 1998 novel "Teatro" and found that it had a definition for every obscure word I didn't know. Highly recommended.

This bilingual dictionary's two greatest virtues are its compact yet readable format and its affordable price. As a bonus, there are brief lists of common words and phrases at the front and back. And, to make it useful in the field, this readily fits many pockets. Best, its plastic slipcover will protect it when your pocket turns sweaty, as it so often will in the countries where Portuguese predominates. This meets my limited needs, as someone who comes across the occasional Portuguese word in passing. Many high school language students will also find that it has all the vocabulary they need. This isn't a scholar's reference, though. Translated definitions tend towards the terse, so they won't cover all usages of a term. It offers plenty if you don't need much, and that's good enough for me right now.

//wiredweird

I lead trips to the Amazon and this is the best dictionary I've found. It is lightweight, can be carried around in a pocket and has had every word I've needed to look for. I now have two and may give one as a gift to my Brazilian boat crew. Highly recommended!

I bought this dictionary to help me in my Portuguese short course before I travel as well as to use on the trip. So far it has had an entry for everything I looked for but, obviously, there was no practical way to see if it has all the words I will ever need. I wish it had been published on thinner paper so that the entire book would fit better in a pocket. I have a German-English and a Spanish-English that are smaller and thinner. There is no reasonable way to know if they contain the vocabulary this one does. However, this is small enough and will be OK if I carry it in my camera bag or have cargo pants with fatter pockets. Overall I recommend the book.

My husband and I have been self-teaching ourselves Portuguese (particularly, the Brazilian version) for a couple years now, as he is a technical instructor who frequently trains visiting Brazilians, and some do not have complete command of English and he needs a good pocket dictionary at his disposal at work. We both LOVE this Random House Webster dictionary, he for work, and me for watching Brazilian TV shows on the Globo network, which we originally ordered from our cable company a couple of years ago at Carnaval time, and fell in love with and kept. What makes this little dictionary so great is that it has over 38,000 entries including phrases, so say you hear a phrase and just look up the word that stands out to you, i.e. "licenca", you find the word and then further down in the description you may get the whole phrase you heard, i.e. "com licenca" which is Brazilian Portuguese for "excuse me" (or literally in their language, "with your permission," as someone is being excused). Not many foreign dictionaries will go the extra mile to give you actual working conversational phrases, but this one does. There are also obscure terms not found in any other Portuguese dictionary, such as a term for an underground railroad house for slaves during their abolition time in history (which was later than the US, around the 1880s) which helped me when watching a historical novela. I would say over 80 percent of the terms you hear in conversation can be found just by looking up the words in this little dictionary, and the only complaint is the print is extremely small, so either have a pair of reading glasses handy or a magnifying glass, and you will find your Portuguese vocabulary richer in no time using this easy-to-carry-around book.

Was very disappointed that I could not read the tiny (6 point) type in this book, even though I have great eyesight. The description, "Large Print" implies that the type is large, but this is misleading, to say the least. Who wrote this description??? Will return this item.

This is a nice pocket dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese. I'm not studying seriously the language, and when reading or writing texts I some times need a quick help for some questions. This dictionary is good for such task.

(I'm not giving five stars because I haven't compared it with any other.)