[.ca] Webster's New World Italian Dictionary: Italian/English, ... (ISBN 0139536396)

websters new italian dictionary:
just what I was looking for. simple and easy to use.

The best affordable Italian dictionary on the market.:
If you're not willing to spend fifty dollars or more and buy a really massive Italian dictionary, this one is the best. For its value, it sells for an absolutely unbeatable price. I've used my copy for about a year and a half and have never ran across a better dictionary. Having tutored several Spanish and German courses, I frequently thumb through some of the pathetic dictionaries my students bring in and I realize exactly why they have difficulty learning a foreign language, or at least a big part of it -- their dictionaries don't provide adequate examples of how the language they're studying actually functions. Naturally, the same goes for Italian. Very few people realize how to use a foreign-language dictionary effectively. You shouldn't regard it as just a "reference" to turn when you can't figure out what a word means. The dictionary is just as important as the grammar -- that is, when you have the right one. A dictionary should be more than a list of words. It should include examples of how each word is used in different circumstances, illustrated by REAL SENTENCES. This is something most dictionaries lack. If I were a beginning student and I wanted to say, for example, "How did he come to be involved in that?", I wouldn't know where to begin using any other dictionary. I could look up the verb, "to involve" and find several verbs, but I'd have no idea which one to pick and what to do with it -- "coinvolgere", "implicare," "essere coinvolto in qualcuno"? At best, most dictionaries only hint at how to use these verbs. The Webster's New World Dictionary not only illustrates how they are actually used by including them in a sentence or two, but also suggests some more idiomatic phrases that might not come to mind. For instance, to say "How did he come to be involved?", a student might put together something like, "Come è venuto essere coninvolto?" -- which is clunky, if not in fact ungrammatical. Something more fluent like, "Come ha fatto a trovarcisi in mezzo?" might never come to mind. But that's one of the examples this dictionary gives to explain the verb "to involve." In addition, the dictionary clarifies how each word is used in different circumstances. While you find this in all dictionaries to some extent, the number of examples this one gives is what makes it better than all the rest. In fact, there are so many of them, organized so well, that since I started studying Italian myself, I've actually read a good part of the dictionary, or at least been copying out some of the entries, playing around with them, comparing related words and expressions. If I had done this with any other dictionary, my brain would have dried up by now! And if you're looking for an excellent Spanish, German, or French dictionary, I recommend the other titles in the Webster's New World series -- I've used them all except the French. Hopefully Webster's will eventually release titles for some less popular languages, too!

Great Dictionary:
I'm a student in a beginning Italian class and I found this book to be excellent. Easy to use and full of information, I'd recommend it to anyone.