Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Best of a Slim Selection, but Only for Starting Out, April 26, 2002
I bought this dictionary prior to heading to Copenhagen for a month to work. It was helpful as a pocket reference for store-front signs and very basic reading vocabulary, but the biggest thing to recommend it, apart from the low price, is the fact that there aren't many alternatives here. With Berlitz, you get 12,000 terms in each language, which will get you around town but not help much with words that have even the slightest disciplinary specificity or currency to them (the word 'e-mail,' for example, is absent, as are many other words that have seeped into everyday use, and this might be due to this dictionary's not having been updated since 1994).The good things about this dictionary are its pronunciation guide (this is actually much more than a good thing, as even more thorough dictionaries I saw in Denmark didn't have this) and its handy reference pages, which give you the quick run-down on how to tell time, for example, or read a menu. In this way, it feels like a guide for beginning learners of the language or tourists. There's nothing wrong with that, but Berlitz ought to indicate this on the cover. It's a good dictionary for the price, and it's perfectly suited to beginning learners of Danish and for short travels. If you plan on using it as a reference guide for reading or for more advanced Danish, you'd do well to look further.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
IPA (Not) For Dummies, December 11, 2004
As other reviewers have pointed out, this little book doesn't have much competition. This is a reasonably useful little dictionary, and is worth its retail price.
Complaint: The English-Danish section gives the reader a pronunciation guide using the IPA. Thus, a Danish speaker has a reasonable idea of exactly how to pronounce the English words. The Danish-English section gives the reader what purports to be a "phonetic transcription," but instead of using the clear and unambiguous IPA, the editors have chosen to saddle the English speaker with a silly, dumbed-down homebrew of an approximate guide to pronunciation. This is NOT a "phonetic transcription," this is a rough guide. Danish orthography, like English orthography, can be tricky and misleading sometimes. Apparently, the editors feel that the big, scary IPA is too much for us anglophones to wrap our pretty little heads around, and that we'll be happy with only a vague idea how to pronounce those dreadful Danish words. "Overraskelse" (surprise)? Just say "o(oo)-o-rahss-gerl-ser." I suppose that's close enough to make me understood, but a "phonetic transcription?" Nope.
Still, this dictionary is better than no dictionary at all, and serves its purpose well enough. The fact that the IPA is OK for Danes but not for anglophones is insulting and annoying, but (oh, well) this is a Berlitz product, after all.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
cute little dictionary, but only for beginners, April 5, 2003
By A Customer
Good things about this dictionary: Pocket-sized, great for travel. Quick lookup, because just gives you the basic definitions you would need as a BEGINNER.Bad things: Couldn't find a few words I needed (such as "boyfriend" and more slang-ish types of words). Only gives one or two possible translations for words that would have at least 10 definitions in an English dictionary. (Example: for the word "miss" they give you only two translations, for using with e.g. "Miss Andersen" and "I miss you," but not for "I missed the bus" etc.) Get this dictionary only if you're a complete beginner, in which case it'll be very handy.
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