Oxford Spanish Dictionary: With FREE SpeakSpanish Pronunciation CD-ROM (available to UK and Europe only): Spanish-English, English-Spanish [Hardcover]

Before buying this book you need to ask yourself just one question. What are my language goals? If you want to pass a GSCE exam or have something to use for reference on holiday, then you can buy a much cheaper, smaller and lighter dictionary that will do the trick just fine. However, if you want to be an advanced Spanish learner, then you'll need a substantial dictionary, and this is the best I've come across, having tried several previous dictionaries of varying sizes.

One problem I have had in the past with dictionaries is the lack of words. This has over 300,000 words and thus realistically covers all the words that even an advanced learner would ever need. Also, there are interesting pages about SMS abbreviations in Spanish and how to navigate an e-mail programme, a must for modern communication. The CD is also a great advantage, and also allows you to toggle between European pronunciation and Latin American, which whilst not huge, is often distinct and thus this CD allows learners to get a feel for the different accents, or alternatively to select which brand of Spanish they are most interested in specialising in. Having said that Spanish pronunciation is very phonetic anyway, so the CD is probably less important than it would be in, for instance, French where the written and spoken language vary much more.

The main weakness of the book is not its content, rather the practical aspects of being such a large book. Its extreme thickness and weight make storage difficult and also makes it less than portable. Instead, this book is suited to private home study, not for being carried around in a school bag or a suitcase.

In short, if you take your learning very seriously and have language goals that stretch far beyond the "C or above at GCSE", then this is the dictionary to buy, but be warned it is very thick, and will take up lots of space on your shelves. Nevertheless, it is the best dictionary on the market to meet the needs of the advanced learner. Those with more modest language ambitions can buy a much cheaper, smaller and lighter dictionary that will work just as well for their needs, but for the advanced, this is the one to buy.

I'm busy learning Spanish at the moment and spend quite a lot of time reading Spanish newspapers and dealing with Spanish language websites. With this dictionary for the first time I'm able to translate almost every word I come across and I'm able to get a greater comprehension of the more subtle nuances being applied.

I've owned a few language dictionaries in my time, but none have come close to the quality of this book. If you're a serious student of Spanish then this is the one for you.

I wrote the review on the 12th Feb then realised I forgot about the free CDROM, so here's a separate review just for the CDROM. The 3 stars on this review apply to the CDROM only! The 1 star I gave to the dictionary itself still applies!

This CDROM *could* actually be quite useful.

The interface is very basic (not a critisism - it means it's easy to use!). There's an area for you to type the spanish word (or words!), two radio buttons to select between european spanish and mexican spanish, a slider for the volume, a slider for the speed (pretty useful this one!!), and a play button, a pause and a stop. And functionality wise... that's it.

You type in your word, select spanish or mexican then press play. The software generates the audio then plays it. Simple. And that's it.

It can also speak a block of words in one go (although this feature is limited to 500 characters)

The only snag is the copy protection means that you can't use the software without the CDROM in the drive. :^(

Which means that I hardly use it, because I'm constantly using my CDROM drive for other things, and good as this software is, it's just not good enough to justify keep getting up to retrieve the CDROM, put it in the drive, wait for windows to read the disk, then start up the software, then type in the text, then wait for it to generate the audio, etc, everytime I want to know how to pronounce a new spanish word.

And yes, I think it generates the audio, rather than playing recordings of human speakers. The good side of this is that you are not limited to a list of words specified when the software was written, the bad side is that at times it does sound slightly artificial. (Although is pretty good none-the-less; I'd still prefer this to using the phonetic transcriptions/symbols etc).

But instead I'm using the collins talking dictionaries ("Collins Talking Spanish-English Dictionary" by Intense Educational) for learning the pronunciation, and quick online word searches.

The collins talking dictionaries are not quite as up to date (big understatement), don't have the capability to speak a block in one go, only have a fixed number of words recorded, and don't include any latin american spanish recordings either, but they are better integrated with their respective (electronic) dictionary (one-click audio from the word in the dictionary), and don't require the CD to be in the drive when using the software,... oh!.. and the audio on the Collins is spoken by a human being.

Without the copy protection I'd have given this Oxford software 4 stars and would probably be using it on a fairly regular basis. (Although I'd probably still be using the Collins just to confirm, as sometimes I have doubts about the odd word generated by this oxford software... most of the time it sounds good and convincing but every now and again... well...hmmm...)