For a tourist muddling through, not for serious learners, August 9, 2004

Dictionaries that, for most entries, simply give a selection of foreign words for an English word with no explanation of how they are used, are only of a limited use to a serious language learner. This is one such dictionary. A good dictionary will strive to give contextual clues for the usage of the various translations, and several common expressions and idioms that are related to the words you are looking up or working with. A further complaint, and a quirk of Indonesian resource writers that I can't copmprehend, is that most resources you buy these days do NOT make any attempt to mark in the occurence of the difference in pronunciation of "e" that occurs in some very common words. I can never see why, as the learner is lost without this guidence! The problem is that for Indonesian, there are so few, if any reasonably-prices dictionaries that are of any real benefit to the language learner. As it happens, and thanks to the 2003 edition of "Teach Yourself Indonesian" (which does, incidentally take into account the pronunciations of "e", as does the old version! Incidentally, I recommend the current edition of "Teach Yourself Indonesian" hands-down for anyone considering learning Indonesian - It's fantastic!), there IS a good dictionary available, but is isn't available through any of the Amazon sites. It is, to my knowledge, only available through OUP (Oxford University Press) Australia and it's called "The Oxford Indonesian Starter Dictionary". It's much better than the one I'm reviewing here!

great value, perfect size, June 12, 2002

I've been making fairly heavy use of this dictionary and find it indispensible. While there are some words missing (the most surprising being "tanpa", without!), it's quite complete for its size and price. You do need to know the root form of verbs to look some of them up, which requires a little knowledge of the language, but all in all it's a great buy.