and this “dictionary” say it has “approx. 650,000 words”, but compare to my paper spanish-chinese dictionary ( 54, 000 words), my paper dictionary is very very very very better than the poor one.

and yes, sometimes the poor one is useful when I’m traveling, because I just need to take one dictionary with me, but for a serious language learner, its really poor, when I was traveling in New Zealand (5 month) I took this one first then I bought another paper english-chinese dictionary in there.

by the way, I bought this one about 1 year ago, I dont know if there has new version, but I dont except it….and why I didnt return this one, thats because I bought this when I was in latin america, it cost me extra 50 us dollar in post fee and I need to pay money to send it back , it didnt worth to do that……

I have a 7 year old, who enjoys this software a lot. I love that the sound quality is very good, and the pronuncioation is perfect. There is plenty of vocabulary to practice. I think this is a really good complement to any language program.

I believe that both,beginners and more advanced students 6-10 would enjoy and benefit from it.

Featured vocabulary: numbers, colors, animals, days, months, weather, means of transportations, clothing, and more.

Easy to use.

Thak you for your service.

This software is a good place to start and would be good for children, but you’re not going to learn Italian with this software alone. The first problem I noticed is common among materials for learning a new language–there is no discussion of phonics. All of my Italian texts have pronunciation guides, but this software package–which offers sound while books cannot–does not. Instead of beginning with basic words, the software should start where we all start learning our native languages–with the alphabet and phonetics. Hearing the sounds would be more useful than trying to sound them out from textbooks. The next problem with this software is vocabulary. I like this software series because it is much cheaper than other software packages, such as Rosetta Stone. You can purchase other products in the series as you go along (EuroTalk Interactive – World Talk! Italian or EuroTalk Interactive – Vocabulary Builder! Learn Italian), and it’s not as great a financial burden as buying a complete learning set at one time. However, you’re not learning enough vocabulary with these programs alone, and they should be supplemented with other products, such as Mastering Italian Vocabulary: A Thematic Approach (Mastering Vocabulary Series). Finally, while I really enjoy have the iPod clips to listen to while I’m away from my computer, it would be better if the spoken words were presented in both English and Italian. That way, I wouldn’t have to look at my iPod to see what the English word is, and I could listen to the tracks while driving.

Overall, I recommend software or CDs to help with Italian pronunciation and this software will certainly help there. Once you are familiar with general pronunciation, you shouldn’t have a problem figuring out how to pronounce other Italian words. The software is much more interactive than simply reading from a textbook and it allows you to quiz yourself on word retention. It’s not the best way to learn Italian, but the simple fact of the matter is that I turned to this program more often than my textbooks because it is much more engaging than print.

1) flat surface

2) scan at constant speed

3) enough contrast in page

I later ordered Power Japanese, an adult software program, and we were much happier.

Overall this dictionary is very good. The Arabic-English dictionary allows you to look up words beginning in either English or Arabic and allows for reverse translation once you’ve found a word (since usually more than one is available) so that you can make sure that the translation is the word you want. For instance say you look up “funny,” and you see two words in Arabic come up in response. You can click on one of the Arabic words and hit the reverse translation button and it will pull up the equivalent in English. While this may seem obvious or maybe frivilous for me to mention, some words such as say, “point,” may have more than one meaning so it’s more useful than one would think. Also, you do not have to look up words by their roots, which makes life so much easier (I’m guessing most of you Arabic students out there know what I mean). Furthermore, the hangman game is pretty amusing and the phrasebook is amazing.

Not only does the phrasebook have hundreds of phrases (more than I’ve been able to go through), but it also says ALL of them out loud in Arabic. This means that you can listen to it and practice it on your own, or if you’re desperate you can just point to the screen to whoever you need to understand your point. The flashcard feature is also pretty sweet beacause you can make your own lists, name them (in English or in Arabic) and add a lot of cards (I think from like 30-50, but I’m not exactly sure cause I’ve never added that many). Although not all of the words in Arabic can be vocalized, a large percentage of them can be and it’s really a)better than nothing and b) very useful because so many of them are. There is also a nifty backlight feature so you can use it regardless of the hour.

There are only two downsides that I can think of: 1) It does drain batteries a little fast, I’d say you’ll probably end up needing new batteries about once every month or month and a half 2) The lack of a keyboard interface. Although the stylus is cool and everything, it’s not quite as efficient as a keyboard.

I got it directly from the ECTACO website as well and got a really good deal (about $154 on sale) and it also came with a bunch of extra software which I haven’t downloaded yet (despite owning it for more than two months, yes, I’m a slacker) but will probably be really cool if this dictionary is any indicator.

I hope that someone finds this helpful and good luck shopping!

The first dictionary could stop working and none of the buttons responded till we would take out the batteries and then put them back in. Usually it happened every day. Than we asked to replace it, and the next unit worked ok for about 2 or 3 weeks. Then it stopped working forever with all our attempts to replace the batteries etc.

Hopefully, the third one would work better, but who knows… The message was clear from the very beginning. I would never buy it one more time, even if for less.

Think twice!