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Rating: 
Summary: Great for anyone who struggles with HOW to use a word
Review: If you're anything like my Spanish students, you can look a word up in a dictionary, know the word in Spanish, and still have no idea what kind of sentence you could use it in. That's where this new little dictionary can help you out. It does not have the breadth of the Oxford Concise dictionary (I highly recommend an Oxford desk dictionary if you're serious about learning Spanish!), but almost every word in the dictionary has an example sentence to describe it. For example: you've looked up "to place" and are pretty sure "colocar" is the translation you want (you want to place something someplace). You then look up "colocar" in the Spanish section and find this sentence: "Coloca este florero arriba de la mesa". Now you know for sure. The layout is also very nice. The main entries are all highlighted in yellow, making it much easier to find words. Plus, there are lots of cultural and grammatical notes dispersed throughout the book: for example, under "comida" you can find the following explanation: "In some Spanish-speaking countries (Bolivia, Uruguay, and Venezuela) comida can refer to lunch or dinner, while in other places (Chile, Colombia, and Perú) it only refers to dinner....". Finally, in the middle of the dictionary there are about 20 pages of two page illustrated vocabulary spread--parts of the body, foods, etc. The negative aspect of the book is that it does not have word pronunciation with the Spanish words. However, Spanish being relatively predictable in its pronunciation, this is not a huge detraction in my mind. I recommend this book to all my Spanish 1- Spanish 3 high school students, and beginnign college students. After Spanish 3, I think it would be a great additional resource, but would not serve as your ONLY dictionary.
Rating:
Summary: Great for anyone who struggles with HOW to use a word
Review: If you're anything like my Spanish students, you can look a word up in a dictionary, know the word in Spanish, and still have no idea what kind of sentence you could use it in. That's where this new little dictionary can help you out. It does not have the breadth of the Oxford Concise dictionary (I highly recommend an Oxford desk dictionary if you're serious about learning Spanish!), but almost every word in the dictionary has an example sentence to describe it. For example: you've looked up "to place" and are pretty sure "colocar" is the translation you want (you want to place something someplace). You then look up "colocar" in the Spanish section and find this sentence: "Coloca este florero arriba de la mesa". Now you know for sure. The layout is also very nice. The main entries are all highlighted in yellow, making it much easier to find words. Plus, there are lots of cultural and grammatical notes dispersed throughout the book: for example, under "comida" you can find the following explanation: "In some Spanish-speaking countries (Bolivia, Uruguay, and Venezuela) comida can refer to lunch or dinner, while in other places (Chile, Colombia, and Perú) it only refers to dinner....". Finally, in the middle of the dictionary there are about 20 pages of two page illustrated vocabulary spread--parts of the body, foods, etc. The negative aspect of the book is that it does not have word pronunciation with the Spanish words. However, Spanish being relatively predictable in its pronunciation, this is not a huge detraction in my mind. I recommend this book to all my Spanish 1- Spanish 3 high school students, and beginnign college students. After Spanish 3, I think it would be a great additional resource, but would not serve as your ONLY dictionary.
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