In my review of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (17th edition), I wrote:

I had hoped the EPD would be the perfect pronunciation resource. It is not. Some American pronunciations are not fully consistent with the “Network English” model. A few are quite strange (e.g. “insh”). The pronunciations of people’s names are occasionally off the mark.

It turns out that calling the EPD “not perfect” was much too generous, at least when it comes to its treatment of American pronunciation.

As I mentioned in my review, the EPD uses a special symbol (a t with a small “v” underneath) to represent the American “flap t” sound, which replaces “regular” [t] in many words, such as better, dirty and beetle. In itself, this additional phonetic symbol is a good thing, as the flapping (or non-flapping) of /t/ in American English cannot be reduced to any simple system of rules.

Unfortunately, the EPD uses the flap t symbol incorrectly in a significant number of transcriptions. Most glaringly, it identifies the following words as containing the flap t:

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But today I’m not going to write about the importance of getting English input every chance you get. Instead, I will give you a very practical reason to install English versions of your operating system and other software rather than versions localized in your native language.

Suppose you have just updated the drivers for your nVidia card. Unfortunately, something has gone wrong and every time you reboot your machine you see the following error message:

Sterownik ekranu przestał działać, ale odzyskał sprawność.

From my new article “Why you should use English versions of your OS and other software” (also published on my other blog).

In this awesome, Robin-Michael-free thread on the Antimoon Forum, wolf727 writes about his views on language learning, which are remarkably similar to mine. His post is so spot-on that I feel I have no choice but to quote most of it here:

When I used to be in England I used to say to my clients who were moving to Spain at the time, if you really want to learn Spanish do it now. Don’t wait till you get to Spain. Because if you are serious about it, really serious, you would start now.

Doing it later means you do not intend to do it. You have to sit in your room, do some basic grammar since you are a beginner, but the most important thing is to read, read, and read. Reading is where you get your input from. Everything else takes second place; they’re just a bonuses.

They got depressed when I told them that. They didn’t like me telling them that nor did they want to believe me. Because it meant it needed effort. They used to look at me as if I was nuts.

The same goes for taking adult evening courses in Spanish. They think that by deciding to take a Spanish course at college means that automatically as if by magic at the end of the course they would be able to speak “good” Spanish. I used to tell them the real effort is when you are in your room reading Spanish. [Read more →]

After decades of neglect, Merriam-Webster, the most renowned American dictionary publisher, has finally made a dictionary for English learners, not just for native Americans.

What’s interesting is that the whole dictionary is available online for free. This is not a crippled version that’s supposed to make you buy the CD/DVD. In fact, the book dictionary does not even include a CD/DVD. If you buy the book, M-W will let you download a Mobipocket version of the dictionary which works on mobile devices. But if you don’t want to use the dictionary on your cell phone, you can just use the online version without paying a dime.

Okay, so the thing is free. But is it any good? The short answer is yes. Unlike the main Merriam-Webster dictionary at m-w.com, the Learner’s Dictionary has plenty of example sentences for almost every meaning of every word. The definitions are much friendlier and the phonetic transcriptions use the International Phonetic Alphabet, as opposed to the nonstandard system used in other Merriam-Webster dictionaries. From the point of view of the English learner, the difference is huge.

Yes, there are flaws. The interface is a bit awkward (for example, to play a recording, it’s click – wait – click – listen, and then click again to close the pop-up window). The entries are hard to read. The search engine was not designed to find anything more than a single word. The phonetic transcriptions will tell you that bought is pronounced the same way as bot /ˈbɑ:t/, which is not true for most American speakers.

Still, the Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary is one the three best online dictionaries for English learners, the other two being the Cambridge Dictionary and the Google Dictionary that I recently wrote about.