Tag Archives: dictionaries

Linguee: the web as a dictionary

We all know how difficult it is to write, even more in a foreign language. More often than not we look up words in dictionaries only to find that it offers so many possibilities for the translation of the word that  we don’t know which one to choose for the context we need. In fact, sometimes it doesn’t help us at all but makes things more complicated as we don’t know which word to use to mean what we want to express and we end up completely frustrated. Here, Linguee can help us as it is a bilingual dictionary but  in context.
Let’s see how it works. Click on the word Linguee and it’ll take you straight to the dictionary. Try the Spanish idiom      ” darlo por hecho” … see? Helpful , isn’t it?

Now, let’s try a single word such as “terminar” .

Now it works as a dictionary with an expandable list of the words in context and   the added possibility of listening to some of the translations.

Give it a try, I’m sure it’ll help you a lot improve your writing skills!

Learning Chocolate… learning vocabulary

Learning Chocolate… I wonder why they’ve chosen this name for a website that helps students improve vocabulary but it certainly does so and in a very efficient way.
There are lots of vocabulary categories to choose from ranging from the easy  Numbers or the Seasons to the more sophisticated Insect Life Cycle.

How do you learn with this page?

Choose a category and begin to learn by choosing from five different activities. Every exercise is taught and revised with the help of pronunciation: for example , in some games you have to match the audio to the word or the words to the pictures and you can also do  a ” fill in the gaps” exercise or a dictation.

What I specially like about this site is that it uses visual aid to help students learn better and faster and at the same time  teaches them how to pronounce  .

So,  I was going to point out that working  with Learning with chocolate  you kill two birds with the same stone but noooo…. you kill four birds … ’cause you can learn Chinese  Mandarin or Japanese too. As always , the choice is yours!

Blog de Cristina is also on Facebook . Follow me!

Merriam-Webster: online word games

Now that you are on holidays and with plenty of time to spare , do you fancy playing some word games? There are

tons of them in the Merriam-Webster word games ,  from spelling games  to word Sudokus , but my favourite is Scrabble.  Have you ever played this game? I’m sure you have in Spanish, so why don’t you give it a go now in English? It’s highly entertaining  and it’ll help you not to forget English.

Howjsay.com : A Pronunciation Dictionary

I’ve been using this pronunciation dictionary for quite a long time and I love it for several reasons:

♥ You can find almost any word here and this includes proper names as it is the world’s largest English pronouncing dictionary.
♥ You enter the word and you submit it. When it appears in pink, mouse over it to hear it spoken as often as you want. You don’t have to wait a second as it is individually pre-recorded!!
♥ You can translate the word into Spanish or any other language using the Google Translate and then get the definition for the word .

I hope you like it as much as I do.

Related Posts:

An amazing dictionary online

And yet another way to improve your vocab

From London with love

Converting Text into Speech

An amazing dictionary online

It is called Visuwords and it’s worth a visit.Never before have I seen such a display of colours, diagrams and words in a dictionary. It is great for everybody to use ‘cause it’s fun and it shows not only the definitions of words but also the connections between words. What’s more, if you place your cursor over any of the words ,the definition appears. You can even click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.If you ver get lost in this crazy tree of words ,use the colour-coded key on the left to understand the connections between the words.