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I take it that everyone has an english/french dictionary. (Although judging by some of the questions we get asked on here I have wondered about this being so.)

So which one have you got?

We have a Larousse with about 800 odd pages in it and it really isn't good enough or big enough either.

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[quote user="DebraA64"] (and something beginning with H I think) dictionary from Geant.  [/quote]

Hachette?

I've got the big Collins/Robert, the 1978 edition (1982 reprint). One of my university tutors always said he could tell which dictionary we had used by our translations. The 1978 Collins/Robert had a wider range of words than later editions but obviously lacked more recent words.

When I have had to use a different dictionary, I have never found it as practical but I think that has a lot more to do with habit. I understand how the Collins/Robert works

 

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A monster size Hachette that I can bearly lift, a concise Harraps 600 page 1997 that I use all the time, a 2 part thing that I won at school in 1967 (am I really so old?) forgotten the make, and a Collins pocket dictionary in each car, in the B & B bedrooms and by the phone.  These last I got for 99p each in The Works in UK and they are very useful for shopping etc.  OH has a specialised dictionary of building terms  Oh, and a delightful Harraps book of slang and swear words much enjoyed by junior visitors to the house.  What a lot of dicionaries - but we do use them.  As I speak French I am constantly being asked to translate for local English folk, and am always amazed that many of them don't even seem to have a dictionary - I would have thought it was a basic requirement.

I have promised to buy myself a French only Larousse as I think it would be useful particularly for technical things.

 

Maggi

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Harraps Shorter - just under 1000 pages has been really good. I don't think we would have managed without it. Backed up with Becherelle "La conjugaison pour tous" and a small portable Collins, which is happily getting less and less use. Oxford mini reference French grammar has also been useful.
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Collins French/English and English/French dictionary (870 ish pages) + grammar section

Oxford-Duden Pictorial French and English dictionary for the exciting stuff of life e.g. Historical ships words (this purchase was recommended on LF)

But we don't carry them around - just try to predict the words and phrases needed on each expedition

John

and

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I think we must have the same monster Oxford Hachette as Cerise (over 900,000 words, phrases etc).

That one lives in front of me and I really should get round to making a trolley to drag it round on. We've also got maybe ten others going down in size to idiot phrase books for long ago holidays.

The best and biggest of all, is Larousse Gastronomiqe.

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Several.  Main one

massive Collins one.  Then a “mid-sized”

Collins one and several small ones (Collins and Oxford).  The small ones are a waste of time (I guess

it is not surprising they don’t have as many words in as the larger ones).  When I first moved here I would not go out

without clutching a dictionary (the size dependant on where I was going).  Now I think there may be one in the

car.  Not convinced my French is much

better but my confidence is.

Ian

 

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Lots - at least six, including the big two-volume Collins. And can I

ever find one? One might think that the Collins would be hard to

misplace, but the biblo-chaos in which we live swallows everything.

When I can find it the Collins is my favourite, but increasingly we

find that a French French dictionary is at least as useful as a French

- English one.

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The most used are the Large Collins Robert which I can barely lift and the smaller Robert Collins which I find the best/easiest.

Various smaller ones/pocket dictionaries/phrase books etc., one kept in the car, one in my bag etc. Children have Larousse. Various other grammar/conjugation/verb books.
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[quote user="Mistral"]

[quote user="DebraA64"] (and something beginning with H I think) dictionary from Geant.  [/quote]

Hachette?

[/quote]

That sounds like it Robert Collins Hachette - we got an extra pocket one at the same time so we can have one in each car as we're forever leaving them behind!

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I've got the "monster" Oxford Hachette too, I find it meets all my needs and is very easy to use ( it came with a CD that "speaks" french words on my computer, but I have never used it).

I've also got a mini Oxford Hachette, which lived permanently in my handbag for my first few months here, but now never sees the light of day.

 

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Debra - "Dick - why do you seem to have disappeared from TF just when they have a current thread on the falling standards of English Language usage?????"

I was banned for posting pictures of kittens... (true). Apparently I am the sort of cynical scum who ruins forums and I am not allowed to post there any more. Ho hum.

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[quote user="Dicksmith"]

Debra - "Dick - why do you seem to have disappeared from TF just when they have a current thread on the falling standards of English Language usage?????"

I was banned for posting pictures of kittens...[/quote]

eh?  What SORT of pictures of kittens???  (Got to be a bit more to it than that!)

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I have...Harrap's New Shorter (would hate to see the longer one), Micro Robert, Grammaire Larousse, a bilingual slang dictionary, Mon Premier Dictionnaire Illustré, Robert/Collins poche and a couple of others. Another copy of the Harraps lives in France for when we visit. Never seem to be able to find one when I want to use it, but rarely use them anyway. They're just an accumulation of years of using the French language. IMHO, any dictionary that you can carry around with you is probably not all that good, and most people don't use dictionaries properly anyway. I can become quite an anorak on the subject of reading the introduction to a dictionary, checking what the abbreviations actually mean, and reading BEYOND the first definition you come to when looking up a word, but then I don't get out much....................[;)]

 

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