'The' English-English ESL Dictionary
Written: Dec 27 '04 (Updated Dec 28 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Frequency bands, informal-direct definitions, Bank of English
Cons: Only black&white instead of color
The Bottom Line: Easiest to use and understand dictionary I came across during the years. The Frequency Bands and the examples from the Bank of English make it unique.
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| imreasztar's Full Review: John Sinclair - Collins Cobuild English Dictionary... |
I have tried many English-English dictionaries over the years, I also have a copy of Oxford, Cambridge, Webster?s, Longman, but Collins CoBuild is just superior to the others.
The most important is the easy to understand, informal, direct explications, which are so called 'context' type definitions. It gives you an explanation that you could also hear in an English class from your teacher, with easy words. The context type definition means that instead of giving you an 'absolute' definition, like philosophers love to do, it puts you the word into a context where it is likely to be used. This makes understanding very, I mean VERY easy, compared to Oxford or Longman, which give 100% accurate, scientific like definitions. But they are hard to understand and put you into that awkward situation, that you go from definition to definition to look up a word that you don't understand in the original article.
The other thing I love in Collins' CoBuild and is unique to this dictionary is the use of Frequency Bands. Every word is rated on a 5-0 scale, which shows how often a word is used in everyday English. Like manpower is rated *, manuscript is **, manufacture is ***, management is ****, market is ***** and marital status is 0. This is an awful lot of help to decide whether to learn a word or not. Clear, a ***** word should be in the active vocabulary of ESL students, while a * word is probably enough to understand. What is more, there is a complete list of all ***** words at the beginning of the dictionary, which I simply recommend to learn and start to use in your active vocabulary. This way your English will sound up-to-date and easy to understand.
Examples from the Bank of English is also a feature that helps a lot in understanding and learning a new word. The Bank of English is a collection, or corpus, of around 400 million words of written and spoken English held on computer for study of language use. It contains a wide range of different types of writing and speech from hundreds of different sources. The material is up to date, with most of the texts dating from 1990 onwards. Although most of the sources are British, approximately 25% of the data comes form American English sources, and about 5% from other native varieties of English - such as Australian and Singapore. These examples show you how to use that word, with which other words it is most likely to be used, similar to a collocations dictionary. I like that these citations are from everyday English and not from Literature, because I want to learn everyday English and not high style. Ex. clockwork - The Queen's holiday is arranged to go like clockwork, everything pre-planned to the minute....
Phonetics are also properly indicated helping to pronounce new words. At the beginning of the dic there is an easy to understand guide to get the feeling how phonetic symbols should sound, based on words you probably already know how to pronounce.
The dictionary contains 110,000 references, so finally you get a comprehensive list of words and it is very unlikely to happen that you do not find a word in your dictionary, which I hate. I really dislike those cut down Oxford dictionaries for students that contain only 35,000 or 50,000 references. I think a dictionary that is for learners should no be shorter, but to contain easy to understand definitions. As you can expect, American and British usage differences are clearly shown, therefore while the dic is edited in Britain and is primarily targeted for European ESL learners, I also recommend it for American ESL learners. The dic also contains usage notes, to emphasize incorrect or unusual usage and gives examples for proper 'English sounding' usages.
There is one downside though, which others do better, it is the use of colors. I like when title words are shown in blue and examples are in gray, it makes finding the right headword much easier.
There is also a CD version out there, with the same content, but with a very easy to use and fast user interface, and with the possibility to do full text searches in the 'Bank of English', so basically it is a reference and collocations dictionary in one. If you are English as a Second Language learner and you want 'the English reference' stuff on your PC, you should go for the Collins CoBuild, MS Encarta Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, these three would cover all you English needs at a very high level. I have both the printed and CD version of Collins CoBuild and they complement each other very well. The CD version is very fast, the printed version is a carry with me, also good for exams and such. If you have a PDA, you can find a version for Psion's, for Pocket PC's and for Symbian mobile phones made by TomTom (that GPS kit company), unfortunately there is no PalmOS version.
All in all, I truly recommend to buy this dictionary if you learn English, my opinion is that this dictionary is just so much easier to use compared to the competition, that you might discover that you actually start to use it on a regular basis. What surprised me is that I bought this dic when I was only at a beginner level, but I still use after many years of learning English. So if you are afraid of the higher price (in some countries, this price is a fortune), I encourage you to go for it, as it will be a long term investment that pays back very well.
update:
Here's a good site about how the Bank of English is used in the dictionary and also about the advantages of a 'context based definition'. http://www.antimoon.com/how/cobuild-review.htm
Recommended:
Yes
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imreasztar
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Location: Budapest, Hungary
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