I’m always on the hunt for good resources, especially for a good dictionary. I’ve been using the RAE dictionary for a while now, but I feel that the explanations are way too complex to help the avarage learner. Now, there are quite some projects going on on the web like dictionaries and word/sentence lists for Spanish, but most of them are crap (I’m sorry, but it’s the reality). Some days ago I found a rather useful tool which could make the life of the Spanish learner a lot easier. The name of that tool is ‘lingro‘.
A quick look at the main page (the dictionary) will show you a field with an input bar, a text field (for definitions) and an option to choose your translation (English -> Spanish, Spanish -> Spanish, etc., etc.). Now, there are loads of Spanish -> English or English -> Spanish dicitonaries, but lingro combines different services to come up with the best definitions. And the best thing is: they’re easy to understand! (At least, most of the time). So no more switching between a dozen of dictionaries, just one for all the good stuff. There is one drawback however: where the Spanish -> English dictionary has over 105,000 definitions from 23 sources, the English -> Spanish and Spanish -> Spanish dictionary has to work with around 30,000 definitions from about 5 sources. This isn’t much, but knowing that they’re still expanding and the clear definitions that are already there still make lingro very useful. Also, you can help by adding definitions for words in any direction you like. For example: you’re quite proficient in Spanish and your native tongue is French for example, then you can add French -> Spanish definitions and vice versa. If you’re a native Spaniard, you can add definitions for words in Spanish, and thus helping learners.
Fortunately, next to the dictionary there are some really bad-ass services that could (or should I say ‘will’) boost your learning. There’s a wordlist service (maybe you should stay away from that), games and a… *drums* webviewer with sentence-mining feature! It’s really good; you just type in the address of a Spanish website, select the way you want to translate (unfortunately there’s not yet a Spanish-Spanish option) and off you are. When you encounter a word that you don’t know, you select it, a small pop-up is being shown with the definition and the sentence is stored with the word in question. There’s also a feature with which your can upload a document 
and do the exact same thing as in the webviewer (although I haven’t tried it yet). Later, you can head to the sentence history option and collect all the good stuff for your SRS. How great is that?
Although lingro is still expanding and needs some tweaking before it can rule the open dictionary market, it’s one of the best projects I’ve come along thus far for Spanish.
My question for you: what dictionary do you use?
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s funny, I just mentioned Lingro in my most recent post on babelhut.com and I was intending to dedicate a post to the site, but you beat me to it! =)
Hehe, sorry
. Hm, now I think of it, maybe I found it through babelhut, oops! Of course, you can still write a post about it as this one is rather short 
.
One thing is for sure, this site is so good I’m going to stop using the dictionary I’ve been using for quite a while: wordreference.com
It will be great for language learners once this site has gained more popularity and more languages/language combinations have been added. Personally, I’d like to see a Spanish-Portuguese combination, as I have been using Spanish to help me with my Portuguese studies (it gets pretty difficult, but I’m learning a lot more Spanish this way).
I’m going to continue using lingro now, instead of wordreference. I can’t wait to see how it grows and develops.
Wow, that’s pretty radical Jeff
. Yesterday I had a project for my college classes Spanish; we had to choose a subject and make 10 or more fichas to explain the words (things like colloquial expressions, example sentences, the sound of the word, etc., etc.). I wanted to do slang words, and WordReference helped me with just about everything…
But yes, Lingro is very good indeed but at that point it wasn’t enough.
It’s not a problem, Ramses! I wasn’t going to go into anymore depth than you did anyway. There’s plenty of other things to post about when I get to it. =)
It’s a really nice resource, but as usual with web apps, it bring us very little compared with what desktop apps used to do for us before.
Before and better in the case of applications like stardict (http://sourceforge.net/projects/stardict/)
Talking about the concept itself, I really love this kind of tiny pop-up dictionaries, they are great especially when you start reading and the web pages are full of unknown words, I can’t imagine how could I have made it without them. It’s a way of starting cracking the language, but at an advanced stage I prefer a proper monolingual dictionary to really learn the words, one with definitions completely adapted to the context I’m facing in that moment, not just a more or less literal translation into another language, which is by the way what can fit into those little windows.
Well, it does have a monolingual dictionary, but it’s not that complete yet. So far I’ve been using the RAE dictionary (I have the CD-ROM version), but most of the time the definitions are too vague and/or complex. I was talking about this with a native friend this week at college, and she agreed that the RAE dictionary isn’t that useful for learners (not even for the more advanced) most of the time.
Is stardict monolingual?
stardict is the application itself, then you have to get the dictionaries from here: http://stardict.sourceforge.net/Dictionaries.php
It also pronounce the words, if you can get a dictionary with sounds. That’s great for me.
About the DRAE, you’re right, it has very few examples and the online version don’t help thinks too much, it’s about as bad as it could possibly have been. It’s just hilarious that words like vine or llevarse don’t return any result. What was they thinking?
I’ve been using wordreference.com, but after hearing about this new gem I’ll give it a try. I doubt I’ll abandon wr.com for this quite yet, but perhaps I can integrate lingro into my learning and maximize my learning. Thanks!
@goldfish: I took a look at stardict, but there seems to be no Spanish-Spanish dictionary at all.
That’s a pity, I just supposed there should be.
I’ve had a closer look at lingro through the English monolingual dictionary and it’s really nice, especially the sentence history. The whole site reminds me of the linguist (http://www.thelinguist.com/en/en/), another nice website I signed up but I never use really. Those all-in-one sites are very attractive, but at the end of the day I prefer separate little tools, different dictionaries, and integrating all that to speed things up, doing a bit of coding if necessary (just scripting).
They say: ‘As a competent but non-expert speaker, he found that looking up new vocabulary took much more time than the reading itself. Frustrated with how slow existing online dictionaries were, he wrote a program to help him translate and learn words in their original context.’
God knows how does he look words up, but it’s not so slow if you have the right tools and know how to use them. Just as an example, and talking about linux now, I have five icons down on the panel for dictionaries: Wikipedia, DRAE, Cambridge, M-Webster and WR. Looking up a word is as simple as double-clicking on the word and doing another click on the appropriate icon. A new tab opens showing the word, just at the right of the current one, or a new window if you’re not working on the browser. These two-lines scripts have been passing on for ages among linux users. There are also other ways, like smart bookmarks, definitely it isn’t that slow.
True, all-in-one tools are great but it’s just what you prefer I think. Anyway, I’m really thankful that there are online/digital dictionaries around these days. When I started out with Spanish, we had this book for you culture classes called “España ayer y hoy”. Not the most interesting book at times, but what it made interesting is the fact that everything in the book is in Spanish.
So when preparing for the test, I couldn’t understand about 80-90% of the stuff, so I would look up words in my paper Spanish-Dutch dictionary to translate the sentences in a rough way so that I could understand them. This took sooooo much time, so when I found Spanish-Dutch dictionary software I thanked God on my bare knees. Then I flew through the book and rocked the test (and my Spanish level skyrocketed as well).
That’s the power of electronic/computer dictionaries, but when it comes to the form they have it’s up to you what you like to use.