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christopherc's review
1.0
Hippocrene's Romanian–English/English–Romanian Dictionary, compiled by Mihai Miroiu is another shoddy offering from a company whose dictionaries are among the worst in the English-speaking world. All the downsides of a Hippocrene dictionary are here. The typesetting is poor, it was seemingly done in a word-processor and uses ugly standard computer fonts (and a conspicuous lack of italics), and to boot a good inch of the bottom of each page before the page number is empty. The dictionary is a simple one-to-one translation of each word, there's no definition of words when they occur in idiomatic contexts. And for a dictionary with so few definitions, it is seized too large for the pocket and is overpriced.
Then there's some dictionary-specific quirks. Though Miroiu's dictionary was first published in 1996, it uses the pre-1993 (Communist-era) orthography that has long been abandoned by the Romanian public. Of course, anyone who works with Romanian will eventually read texts using the old orthography, but it's important for students to know about the various systems, and Miroiu doesn't even mention the existence of a new orthography. And though Hippocrene is an American publisher, the pronunciation of English words is given according to the Received Pronunciation, not General American.
If you are an English-speaker learning Romanian, you'll need to obtain a dictionary from a Romanian publisher, since there's nothing too grand from English-language presses. Try the Theora dictionaries, which are much more useful and polished. There are also so-called "orthographical dictionaries" which are vital for students, as while they don't contain definitions, they show the formation of the genitive and the plural for nouns and the conjugation patterns of verbs. Hippocrene is a publisher that usually disappoints, and this dictionary is no exception.
Then there's some dictionary-specific quirks. Though Miroiu's dictionary was first published in 1996, it uses the pre-1993 (Communist-era) orthography that has long been abandoned by the Romanian public. Of course, anyone who works with Romanian will eventually read texts using the old orthography, but it's important for students to know about the various systems, and Miroiu doesn't even mention the existence of a new orthography. And though Hippocrene is an American publisher, the pronunciation of English words is given according to the Received Pronunciation, not General American.
If you are an English-speaker learning Romanian, you'll need to obtain a dictionary from a Romanian publisher, since there's nothing too grand from English-language presses. Try the Theora dictionaries, which are much more useful and polished. There are also so-called "orthographical dictionaries" which are vital for students, as while they don't contain definitions, they show the formation of the genitive and the plural for nouns and the conjugation patterns of verbs. Hippocrene is a publisher that usually disappoints, and this dictionary is no exception.