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Langenscheidt Universal Dictionary
Universal Phrasebook Spanish
Book by Langenscheidt
255 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1999
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4 people want to read
About the author
Langenscheidt
722 books17 followersLangenscheidt is a German publishing company, specialising in language resource literature.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 28, 2007
This is a great little phrasebook for people who already know the Sesame Street basics of Spanish, but want a helping hand while travelling. It's tiny and fits easily in a pocket or sack, and the edge coded sections make it easy to flip through to what you need - essential when trying to have a conversation. It also has the very important dialectical options, since Latin American Spanish and Castillian Spanish can be wildly different and terribly confusing.
The minus is about conversation as well, though. All the phrases are very formal and slightly antiquated in that high school language course way, which makes it very hard to translate what regular people are saying. This is fine if all you're doing is negotiating a hotel price or that watermelon at the market, but there's a whole section called "Human Relations", dealing with business contacts, meeting strangers, and potential hook-ups that feels entirely artificial. "I would love to show you the city. May I take you home?" Sure - that's how it goes down.
On the other hand, I once used the phrasebook to translate "My hovercraft is full of eels.", which entertained me to no end, so it can't be all that bad. "Mi aerodeslizador es bastante de las anguillas." Yeah.
The minus is about conversation as well, though. All the phrases are very formal and slightly antiquated in that high school language course way, which makes it very hard to translate what regular people are saying. This is fine if all you're doing is negotiating a hotel price or that watermelon at the market, but there's a whole section called "Human Relations", dealing with business contacts, meeting strangers, and potential hook-ups that feels entirely artificial. "I would love to show you the city. May I take you home?" Sure - that's how it goes down.
On the other hand, I once used the phrasebook to translate "My hovercraft is full of eels.", which entertained me to no end, so it can't be all that bad. "Mi aerodeslizador es bastante de las anguillas." Yeah.
Displaying 1 of 1 review