Prime linguistic resource--but not first pick for travel, December 7, 2004

Newmark has made a top-notch tome worthy of the Oxford name. His coverage of modern and literary ancient Albanian is listed very well by the following reviewer.

Realize that this book is only from Albanian to English. So it is very comprehensive if you are translating Albanian works, but not readily useable if you speak English and want to express yourself in Albanian. Due to this 'one-way' aspect, English-speakers *won't* find it helpful as a travel dictionary--besides the fact it's not a portable size.

As a literary, linguistic reference, it shines bright. If you are or speak Albanian, you will find this much more scholarly than Pavli Qesku's excellent dictionaries that are available/published in Albania.

If you travel to Albania and intend to become a student of the language, I recommend you acquire two books by Pavli Qesku published by EDFA-Tiran? Fjalor Anglisht-Shqip and Fjalor Shqip-Anglisht. You can buy these bound together as a single volume, but I find it much easier to use them as separate books since you can have them both open to the entries you are looking up for cross-referencing. Respectively, they each contain 40,000 and 35,000 entries and 100,000 and 150,000 phrases.

Also while in Albania, look for Mandalina Losha and Kathryn Church's Practical Albanian for Foreigners and Basic Albanian Grammar for Foreigners. These are written in English and workbook format for serious study. For learning how to pronounce Albanian, there really is no subsitute for a real Albanian--it's hard for an English speaker to get the phonetics correct without a live tutor.

One of the most excellent dictionaries that I have seen, April 22, 2002

The Oxford Albanian-English Dictionary is an example what a serious lexicographer can achieve when he puts all his knowledge and energy in his work.

The features of the dictionary:

- it covers indeed very large vocabullary and gives almost-complete coverage of the language
- makes extensive use of grammar, stylistic etc. notes
- there is plenty idioms, examples of use, colloquial and slang expressions
- for many words it lists not only the dictionary form, but derived forms as well if they cannot be easily figured from the dictionary form(which occurs in Albanian quite frequently)
- there is a sketch of Albanian grammar in the beginning of the dictionary
- it contains also a "back dictionary" which lists all possible two(sometimes three) letter combinations that can occur at the end of Albanian words and gives for them grammatical values that these letters can represent(eg. masculine definite accusative-nominative or 2nd person of present tense etc.)
- there is a list which lists orthographical and phonetical pecularities of non-Standard Albanian and their equivalents in the Standard Albanian. Many words deemed "non-Standard" are included into the dictionary.

Although I am a real beginner in Albanian and some days ago I litteraly didn't know a single word of this language, yet with the help of this dictionary I was able to find out the sense of several short poems in Albanian!

English Albanian Dictionary, April 10, 2000

How can it buy a person from Macedonia Leonard Newmark's Dictionary. How can we pay it. E-mail:Sali-f117@usa.net