The Firefly Mini Spanish/English Visual Dictionary

I purchased this book because it will help me to find the proper Spanish word for various items/things. I live in S. America for now and this book is a plus. It helps me to find the Spanish word for items which I may have a difficult time describing. The book is broken up into sections with easy to view pictures and accompanying Spanish/English terms. A definitely good purchase and I am glad I did it. I got the idea to purchase this book from someone in my office with the same book.

This is a very detailed dictionary - great for medical students or any other students. There are a lot of detailed translations of things I'm not sure I'll ever need to speak about, such as the space station, parts of a rocket, lots of insects, cuts of meat, construction vehicles, the solar system, etc. Very interesting for my 5 year old boy to look at and learn both English and Spanish words. I am a beginning Spanish student and, right now, this book is not very helpful to me. But it's great to look at.

I am a teacher of Spanish and own a number of visual dictionaries, including the Firefly Five Language Dictionary, the Firefly Spanish/English Dictionary and the DK Five Language Visual Dictionary. I prefer the Firefly dictionaries because they tactfully include the gender of words as a superscript after the word rather than as an indirect article, as in the DK dictionary. The latter has the ill-effect of creating ambiguous genders in instances where the indirect article is truncated: For example: garlic - l'ail - der Knoblauch - el ajo - l'aglio The size of this mini edition and hardened cardboard cover make it almost small enough to keep in your pocket, and easily transportable in a bag for trips or going back and forth to school or work. It is a very usable format for a visual dictionary, without substantially reducing the quantity or quality of the images. The smaller size does mean that the print smaller, but it is still very readable. The full size, hardcover Spanish/English dictionary by Firefly does not contain any more information than this Mini edition, but the Firefly Five Language Dictionary contains almost twice as many pages. Given that the image layouts used in all of the firefly dictionaries are from a common master, the page count is a very good indication of the word count. Frankly, the quantity of the words in the mini is ample for even most advanced students of Spanish. As with any visual dictionary, this one focuses on nouns. Students of the Spanish will still want to have a quality pocket bilingual dictionary like the Larousse: Larousse Student Dictionary Spanish-English / English-Spanish (Larousse School Dictionary) And a quality Spanish-only dictionary like the Dictionario Practico del Estudiante: Diccionario Practico del Estudiante/ Student Dictionary

On a scale of 1 to 5 I give this a 10! This dictionary is really great! It would be very good for ESL studies, or an English speaker learning Spanish. It reminds me of the Richard Scarry books I loved as a child. Even though it says pocket you would need a pretty big pocket, but, it is worth carrying around though. I also bought the full size version for home, and just gave the 5 language version to a niece still deciding what language to study. A+++++