No one would call America a small, insignificant country (at least not to its face), so why don't the manufacturers of electronic dictionaries make products with the base language as English? Almost every single Japanese, Korean or Chinese person at my school (i.e. 60% of the entire student population) has an electronic dictionary. I was in Media Markt (an electronics store) yesterday, and I even overheard one employee telling another that if a Japanese person comes in to send them straight to the electronic dictionaries, since that's all they ever buy.
I don't remember electronic dictionaries as working very well, but that was when I was twelve, which is like the age of the dinosaurs in electronic-dictionary terms. The Casio Ex-word versions the Japanese use now are fantastic. Not only do they include Japanese-Russian-English dictionaries, complete with conjugations, usage examples etc, but also monolingual dictionaries in Russian and Japanese, an encyclopaedia in Japanese, grammar textbooks in Russian and Japanese, and they have audio recordings of all the words so you can hear how they should be pronounced. Pretty cool, right? Having one massively reduces the time spent looking up words, and since they are really small, they are perfect for people who want to exercise in the gym rather than carrying around dictionaries the size of a couple of bricks.
Naturally I wanted to buy one, preferably a Russian-English-German-Spanish one, since then my dictionary buying days would be forever at an end, but I was prepared to accept Russian-English. Unfortunately Casio's UK/US websites don't even mention the things, because they don't produce them for English-speaking people. If I wanted one where the base language was German, or French, or Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese or seemingly any other language known to man, I could buy one, but not for English. You might think I could buy the one built for Russians learning English, and I might end up doing that, but it is far from ideal. For a start, you can't click through to see the conjugation of a verb you have looked up in English, you have to look it up again in Russian. Secondly, there is only audio for English words, not for Russian ones, and thirdly, the thing includes ten monolingual English dictionaries and only one Russian monolingual one, and no Russian grammar. I didn't even know that you could have ten different monolingual English dictionaries - doesn't that just mean the first nine were missing out words? It even contains 100 works of world literature in English, and the texts of famous English speeches. Even though it doesn't exactly take up space, I would still have to pay for all that rubbish, when I only actually want two out of seventeen volumes on the machine (or three if you count the encyclopaedia in Russian). Since these things cost £250, it means that only £45 of that would be useful to me.
I feel very aggrieved.
I don't remember electronic dictionaries as working very well, but that was when I was twelve, which is like the age of the dinosaurs in electronic-dictionary terms. The Casio Ex-word versions the Japanese use now are fantastic. Not only do they include Japanese-Russian-English dictionaries, complete with conjugations, usage examples etc, but also monolingual dictionaries in Russian and Japanese, an encyclopaedia in Japanese, grammar textbooks in Russian and Japanese, and they have audio recordings of all the words so you can hear how they should be pronounced. Pretty cool, right? Having one massively reduces the time spent looking up words, and since they are really small, they are perfect for people who want to exercise in the gym rather than carrying around dictionaries the size of a couple of bricks.
Naturally I wanted to buy one, preferably a Russian-English-German-Spanish one, since then my dictionary buying days would be forever at an end, but I was prepared to accept Russian-English. Unfortunately Casio's UK/US websites don't even mention the things, because they don't produce them for English-speaking people. If I wanted one where the base language was German, or French, or Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese or seemingly any other language known to man, I could buy one, but not for English. You might think I could buy the one built for Russians learning English, and I might end up doing that, but it is far from ideal. For a start, you can't click through to see the conjugation of a verb you have looked up in English, you have to look it up again in Russian. Secondly, there is only audio for English words, not for Russian ones, and thirdly, the thing includes ten monolingual English dictionaries and only one Russian monolingual one, and no Russian grammar. I didn't even know that you could have ten different monolingual English dictionaries - doesn't that just mean the first nine were missing out words? It even contains 100 works of world literature in English, and the texts of famous English speeches. Even though it doesn't exactly take up space, I would still have to pay for all that rubbish, when I only actually want two out of seventeen volumes on the machine (or three if you count the encyclopaedia in Russian). Since these things cost £250, it means that only £45 of that would be useful to me.
I feel very aggrieved.
Good articles, Have you heard of Mr Benjamin, Email: 247officedept@gmail.com --WhatsApp Contact:+1-9893943740-- who work with funding service they grant me loan of $95,000.00 to launch my business and I have been paying them annually for two years now and I still have 2 years left although I enjoy working with them because they are genuine Loan lender who can give you any kind of loan.
ReplyDelete