Collins Gem Italian Dictionary: Italian-English English-Italian

By HarperCollins

The acclaimed CollinsItalian Gem Dictionary has been revised and updated with the latestvocabulary in a stunning eighth edition. Collins Italian Gem Dictionary 8th Edition includes usefultravel... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 000470746X
• ISBN13: 9780004707464
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Harperreference
• Length: 640 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.1" x 1.1" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Excellent for General Use

The Collins dictionary is well organized and easy to use. For more elusive grammatical concepts, I would purchase a work; such as, "The Everything Learning Italian Book" by Fillippo which covers elusive areas of grammar like verbal conjugations and an extensive verbal conjugation reference guide. I find that the guide is an excellent resource for a beginner or traveller who plans to use the language. Italian is very similar to Spanish. For persons already familiar with Spanish, the Collins dictionary in Italian will be a breeze.

An excellent pocket dictionary for learners of Italian

This listing describes the 4th edition (1998) of the COLLINS GEM ITALIAN DICTIONARY, Italian-English and English-Italian. This new edition updates the original edition, prepared by lexicography firm Lexus, to reflect Collins' Bank of English corpus. The dictionary is quite large. I've used it for a decade now and have encountered few limitations. It has over 70,000 translations and defines words not only in the standard definition but also in common idiomatic contexts. An appendix lists the numbers in Italian and English and explains how they are used in dates and times. For me, a wonderful thing about this dictionary is that it gives phonetic transcriptions in IPA for many Italian words, clarifying for example when the letter o represents an open-mid back rounded vowel and when it represents a close-mid back rounded vowel, a tricky issue for learners. While the paper on some Collins Gem dictionaries tends to yellow, my Italian dictionary still looks good as new, and the vinyl cover has proven quite durable. All in all, this is an excellent pocket dictionary I would highly recommend. It's well represented on the used market, so it can be had economically.

Excellent for travel or when on-the-go...

If your plan is to buy a dictionary for studying Italian, I would buy something a little bit more thorough, but the Collins Gem is the perfect size for taking on a trip (tiny!) and is the best on the market in this class... during my travels in Italy, it was a great aid, and i even found lots of unusual words that i didn't expect of a dictionary like this (including some colloquial words that a lot of dictionaries just leave out due to academic snobbery, but which are essential for basic understanding)... The size is unbeatable since it will even fit in your pocket, the pronunciation guide is perfect (though it's in brazilian if that is important to you), and verbs are given in a table that is sufficient for travel use...what else could you ask of such a small little dictionary that no one will notice as you backpack around or hit the town with 20 million other travel items in your pocket!

Good but lacks obvious requirements

All the Collins dictionaries are good general references forcommonly needed foreign words and expressions. My experienceswith the German, Italian, Spanish and French editions has beengood. The blue-coding is an excellent idea, and makes wordsearches much easier. The vocabulary selection is reasonablyadvanced.The one major failing of the Collins series is in the German andItalian versions. In these two languages, it is a must to providethe past participles for all verbs listed. These two languagesare simply too unpredictable in this area, and the pastparticiple cannot always be guessed just by knowing the infinitive form. Even if a good guess could be made, it helpsthe person using the dictionary to actually see the participlewritten out. In the German version, the user also needs to seethe plural and dative endings. Collins indicates in small printat the beginning of the book that, "the plurals and datives areformed in the usual way, and only the exceptions are noted." Thisis unsatisfactory. The "usual way" for German plural and dativeforms? Again, seeing it reinforces it. It would also be veryhelpful to have the simple past tenses of verbs reference theinfinitive they are derived from. You cannot always guess whatthe infinitive in Italian or German was just by seeing the simple past tense. This would be especially easy to add to theelectronic versions (see below).The only other thing I would say about the Collins series is thatthe electronic versions should be more available. For example,I was told at a bookstore recently that the French-EnglishDVD version of Collins was unavailable for some reason. Withall the worthless software out there, why can't we please havea comprehensive dictionary on our PCs? Anyone interested inthis might want to consult the Harrap's company, based in France. They used to put out a good product.

A great "little" dictionary!

Obviously, a miniature didctionary like this one can't include the amount of information found in a home reference-type dictionary, but for a small travel dictionary, or one for a beginning student of Italian, this one is really good. I used it for a two-week, intensive language course in Rome and every word I needed for class I found in this dictionary. It's also very compact and will fit in a pocket, purse, or fanny-pack. If you want something a little more complete, yet still paperback book-size, I recommend the Bantam New College dictionary. Now, does anyone have a recommendation for a complete, home-reference dictionary???