One of the known issues at LingQ is the fact that the dictionaries provided through Babylon are not always ideal. Swedish, for example, is one language where the dictionary offered by Babylon for Swedish - English is especially bad.
I find the Russian - English dictionary OK but not great.
Are people using other dictionaries and cutting and pasting? Can you recommend good dictionaries for different languages?
In the future, when we have the time, we will make it easier to link to the best dictionaries. Please let us know if this is a problem and what you are doing about it right now. This will help us for the future.
http://www.wordreference.com/, good for trying compound expressions, as phrasal verbs, for instance. It’s associated with a great forum, where one can get language explanations in a matter of minutes (at least for the English Only forum). But don’t make silly questions, or you will receive bad tempered answers!
http://www.merriam-webster.com/, English-English, with sound files for pronunciation.
All are for free. Hope they are useful.
For Swedish-German I use Schwedisch Deutsch sa and Lexin (which was offline for some days).
For Russian, apart from the LingQ dictionary, I have used my Oxford Russian dictionary. When I’m not sure about the meaning of the English translation, I use an English-German dictionary.
Should somebody need good online dictionaries for German-English, German-French and German-Spanish, there is http://dict.leo.org/ of the Munich University of Technology for all three combinations.
Even though it can translate not only words but sentences I would not recommend to use it that way: try to translate some English phrase to your native language and you will see why.
Yes Earnie, I agree.
On another thread I recommended dict.cc too because not only the translation is good - you find often different uses AND you can listen to the sound and a correct pronunciation.
Often when I cannot find anough in babylon on lingQ I look in dict too.
I just want to make sure that all of you know that you can access dict and lingvo from the Additional Dictionaries area on the LingQ Widget. Under the Babylon dictionaries you can find links to other dictionaries. Different dictionaries are available in different languages. I find these very useful when Babylon doesn’t have the definition.
I would like to understand how LingQ defines the dictionaries to be used. I’ve always studied English with reasonable results in most cases, but when I go to French, the results are terrible, I almost always end up using wordreference or michaelis (Portuguese-French)…
The main dictionaries are provided by Babylon. The quality of their dictionaries varies from language to language. We provide other options below the dictionary definitions provided by Babylon.