Learner Dictionaries and More

Lingro.com is a great site. As I mentioned here http://georgeroberts.blogspot.com/2009/01/lingro-o-dicionrio-clique.html, lingro can help you increase your vocabulary and have more fun reading English. Also, it alows you periodically to review those new words you found today or weeks ago.

Lingro is a dictionary compiled by volunteers. For this reason, some expressions may be missing of the definition given does not make sense in context. At Lingro itself, the English-English option can give you the definition you need. But there are also many other free Internet dictionary resources.

Cambridge (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/) publishes excellent dictionaries and also offers a whole family of free resources on the net. The default dictionary is the Advanced Learners, but there are several other options as well,, if for some reason the Advanced Learners doesn't do the job: American English, Phrasal Verbs (a problem area for most students), Learners and Idioms. In case you're interested: the site also has a Turkish-English dictionary. I looked up the phrasal verb "look up"at Advanced Learners, which only gave me the rather uncommon meaning of "getting better": Things are looking up. Things are improving. But that's not what I wanted. The Phrasal Verbs dictionary, however, was right on the money. After looking through an extensive menu of verbs not related to the search term, I found to look up or look stg up (in dictionary talk sb means something. Sb = somebody). In most learners' dictionaries these days, the definition is much simpler than the term being defined. This does not always happen with dictionaries for native speakers. For this reason, it is preferable to use only specific learners' dictionaries such as these from Cambridge in the early stages of learning.

A very useful resource for those wishing to enjoy an expression in all its richness is the Collins Cobuild Concordancer http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx. In the search box, enter your term. If the term has more than one word, you need to place a + between the words. At the end of the page, click "show conchs" and a new window with up to 40 sentences using the word or phrase requested will appear. These sentences are extracted from millions of pages of text in the Collins database and show how the term is used in a variety of different contexts. Give the Concordancer a try!