Random House Webster's Pocket French Dictionary, 2nd Edition

by H. Treichel, Susan Husserl-kapit, Francesca L.V. Langbaum

Random House Webster's Pocket French Dictionary features over 30,000 entries and both French-English and English-French translations in a great pocketsize format. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375701567
• ISBN13: 9780375701566
• Release Date: December 1997
• Publisher: Random House Reference
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 3.5" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

A compromise between completeness and compactness

Pocket dictionaries aren't intended to be comprehensive; they're intended to be portable and to address the more commonly used words to assist people on the go. To that end this particular dictionary is fairly useful under most circumstances as it can easily slip into a pocket, purse, fanny pack or a camera bag. The print is quite small however, so if you need reading glasses you'll need them! That or buy a larger dictionary. One quick problem I encountered in Montreal was the differences between French as spoken in France and French as spoken in Quebec as sometimes both cultures use different words. In more than a few instances I was left drawing a blank as this is geared towards French as spoken in France. Mercifully most Quebecois in Montreal switch to English effortlessly. Were I elsewhere in Quebec I'd probably be in trouble. If you're looking for a proper dictionary where portability is not the primary concern then I would not recommend this one. Students would be well advised to select a better dictionary, particularly one that includes phrases, metaphors and idioms, as this one will be of little use to you. This is fine for prowling the streets of Paris, Marseilles, Montreal or Lyon or perhaps reading Le Monde, but not if you're trying to grasp the subtleties of Proust or Descartes in the native language.

Ok

I gave this 4/5 stars not because it's really good, but because it's good for what it is. If you're only going to buy one French dictionary, this should definitely not be it. There are plenty of words that are not defined in it, and the definitions themselves are quite short and often incomplete with words that have multiple meanings. However, as a pocket reference to have on the road or when you just need a quick and basic definition, it's quite fine. It literally will fit in your pocket, or purse, and will certainly do when you can't drag your bigger dictionary around with you.