limitations of sony dictionaries

[sovre]

I thought I'd start a thread to discuss the limitations of the Sony dictionaries, because I have come across some surprising ones which I would not expect in a finished product. I don't know if anyone can develop software to make the dictionaries more useful. That would be great if so; if not, I can only hope Sony upgrades them to address these problems.

Here are a few of the things I have noticed:

Sony dictionaries do not recognize hyphenated words as a single word; so, in other words, the dictionaries do not distinguish between a short and long dash. Click on a hyphenated word like "first-class" and what you get is the definition for "first."

I have encountered a significant number of words in the English dictionary which, when clicked on, display etymological information about the word, but no definition. The less common the word, the more likely this is to be the case, which is bad news, since the less common words are just the ones a reader is most likely to need to look up.

Using the dictionaries to look up words in Romance languages like French, Spanish, and Italian is not as smooth as I expected, primarily because the Sony dictionaries are not programmed to deal with instances of elision. In other words, they do not eliminate unnecessary information coming before an apostrophe. The result is that if you want to get the definition of a French word like L'ALLURE or L'HOMME, you must yourself delete the L', so that only ALLURE or HOMME remains, and then access the dictionary yourself to look up the word. So much for two-click definitions! The same problem arises with any reflexive verb containing an apostrophe. If you click on: "s'éveiller" in search of a definition, nothing will come up. You must manually delete the S' yourself and then access the dictionary to look up "éveiller."

I would say these limitations with elision in the foreign language dictionaries are the biggest problem of all, because they make them unnecessarily cumbersome to use.

[readingglasses]

Of the five languages the sony prs translates, only French commonly uses apostrophes (english uses apostrophes at the end of words, not the beginning, so it's less of a problem, I'm assuming).

How well are case endings handled in Deutsch and Nederlands? Do you still get your noun defined if it's in feminine genitive? Do you still get your verb defined if it's in past tense and has an internal vowel change?

How are verb conjugations defined, in French, since you used it? If you look up subjunctive "fasses" does it say "2nd person subjunctive faire - 'to do' " ?

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by sovre

The result is that if you want to get the definition of a French word like L'ALLURE or L'HOMME, you must yourself delete the L', so that only ALLURE or HOMME remains, and then access the dictionary yourself to look up the word.

French is complicated. I blame their Kings and academics.

Originally Posted by readingglasses

How are verb conjugations defined, in French, since you used it? If you look up subjunctive "fasses" does it say "2nd person subjunctive faire - 'to do' " ?

"fasses" returns the infinitive "faire" with several pages of definition. It does not return any information about the conjugaison. For French, that would require a separate book

I have to frig about a bit sometimes, but overall I've found the dictionaries to be excellent.