An excellent app carrying a beginners dictionary

The framework of this app is very good – its been through many iterations, and on many platforms: Ive purchased it and re-purchased it for Newton, Palm, MacOS, OS X, and Windows over the years, in addition to this iOS version. It served me well when I was a beginner, but now, it just doesnt have enough words, nor are the definitions nuanced enough for me to trust that Ill use or understand a word correctly. If you are a beginner, it may be the right choice for you, but please read on.

The Larousse bilingual is a better dictionary (and is much less expensive), but that app isnt as good as this one. Ultralinguas own FR-EN Collins offering is a better bilingual than this, and uses the same excellent dictionary engine as this, but is much more expensive. For a similar level of investment, one can purchase Le Petit Robert for iPad – there is no better one-volume monolingual dictionary currently available in print or in digital form than the Robert. Alternatively, Roberts Dixel is also a superb monolingual dictionary – less scholarly than Le Petit, but including more proper nouns – and runs both on iPhones and iPads. (If youre not yet at the level that a first-rate monolingual makes sense for you, then this dictionary may, in fact, be just right for you. Id still encourage you to stretch a bit by trying the Larousse bilingual, however.)

My compromise is to grumble about how clunky the Larousse bilingual is, use it only when Im stuck, and mostly use Le Petit Robert, or the Dixel if my iPhone is the device at hand. In the final analysis, however, it comes down to whether the underlying dictionary will support me. In reading an article in Le Monde yesterday, for an example, I needed to look up 6 words. Only one of them was present in this dictionary, and the proposed definition was insufficient. In contrast, all 6 had good definitions in the bilingual Larousse, and in Le Petit Robert. None of those words was arcane; the Sunday Le Monde magazine section is written, after all, for a wide (but Francophone) audience. Theres almost never a situation for which this Ultralingua bilingual remains the best choice for me. A guiding principle one hears in ones study of Software Engineering is the desirability of designing for "a low threshold, and a high ceiling." This dictionary provides the first, but not the second.

Tburgueso about Ultralingua French-English, v1.5.1