Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic !, 3 Oct 2004
This is really a book to treasure, especially if you are an upper-intermediate or advanced learner with an aim to achieve proficiency in English.It has it all !: - Extensive vocabulary.
- Phonetic transcription of every single word and expression.
- Clear definitions supported by plenty of examples that help. you get a "feel" of the language.
- More importantly, it tells you precisely WHEN it is appropriate to use a certain word or expression closely related to others in meaning. Although it can be used as a dictionary, I regard it more as a book to read and revise from beginning to end. At this level, I also recommend the acquisition of a good dictionary of idioms, phrasal verbs, colocations and more technical and specialised vocabulary ( see Oxford-Duden Pictorial, maybe you'll find a bilingual edition that suits you ). Returning to the Language Activator, it's a MUST-HAVE
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A New, Sleeker and Simplified Language Activator, 12 Feb 2003
In this, the Second edition of their full-size Activator, Longman are continuing with the simplified presentation they introduced in their smaller Essential (1997) and Pocket (2001) editions; it seems as if students especially prefer the new, easier layout. Gone then, and now seemingly never to return are the perhaps confusing "What meaning?" access maps, and the admittedly repetitive, presumably seldom-used (I myself always skipped them anyway!) "meaning maps" (basically long lists of numbered definitions, which were duplicated in the body of the keyword sub-entries anyway) of the First edition. The only traces now left of anything resembling them are smaller, less cluttered "Related words" sections, which are more to give an indication of the notional range and links of the concept than to point out "confusables" (incidentally, for those interested in notions, the Cambridge International Dictionary of English's CD-ROM would be a good buy). That being said, as the page-count between the two editions is roughly the same, perhaps these extra look-up methods could've been retained (there might've been some people who found them useful)? Arguably much less of an improvement is the continued decision to now separate the keywords from the full A-Z listing of words and phrases (the latter is now an index at the back of the book, rather than being integrated into the main text, as it was originally); it is obviously impossible now to survey in one look-up the general "conceptual mapping" of a word's meanings alongside its specific examples, syntactic behaviour and collocations. Further gripes would be that Longman have chosen not to reprint the interesting essays by members of the First edition's Advisory Committee (they could've easily been inserted unobtrusively before the new preface), or to include an actual clear list of the keywords. This may be because the number of keywords - the "meanings at the heart of the English language" - has been reduced from the First edition's 1052 down to 866. This shouldn't be anything for Longman to be ashamed of, though, because some of the divisions of meaning before were perhaps too "fine", academic or downright strange, and it probably would've been a bad sign if the number had actually increased (presuming the corpora were fairly comprehensive to begin with a decade ago, they'd've hardly missed that many meanings). The reduction is no doubt partly due to combining the older keywords into "superkeywords" (my term, not Longman's), sudividing the superkeyword into sub-entries, and letting the definitions do more work, rather than having totally seperate (but still somewhat related) keywords, as before. Anyway, what of the text itself? Has it changed appreciably? Della Summers, the Director of Longman Dictionaries, states in her new preface that "Based on our now much-larger Longman Corpus Network, 60 per cent of examples have been improved." Quite what "improved" means I'm not sure, because some of the new examples I noticed did not seem to be an improvement to me, but by the same token, about 40 per cent do seem to be the same. Either way, it is good to have newer examples to choose from, and the more streamlined, less eccentric organization of this new edition of the Activator, particularly as far as assignment of words and phrases to keywords, and the reduction of keywords are concerned, mean that if you missed the First edition, you should definitely buy the Second. If you already have the First, you may want to look before you leap, especially since the Second lacks the essays, and perhaps the charm of the First, but if the desire to compare the two at your leisure gets the better of you, you probably won't feel you totally wasted your money. Incidentally, I should close by saying that the full-size Activator is, in my opinion, more a tool for helping teachers to think and organize meaning and their teaching than for students; the instructions in both editions that imply students should take perfectly acceptable "basic" English, and make it into something supposedly more "appropriate" by use of the Activator, have never impressed me much.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
almost perfect, 28 April 2000
By A Customer
it helps me in using a word, not just to tell me the meaning of the word. now i am more confident in choosing or saying a word than before. i hope Longman can improve it to a dictionary on CD, combining the features of this dictionary and that of the Langman contemporary dictionary. it will be easy to carry and browse.
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