I've talked about sites that help you conjugate verbs, but what about dictionaries? Shall we take a look at them?
First, let me show you some bilingual dictionaries.
WordReference is very complete and provides a lot of examples, which is essential, I believe!
This
dictionary gives you a lot of information about the word: there are
explanations about the meanings AND synonyms - come on, now, that's amazing.
Not to mention there are examples with each meaning (some of them
translated), examples of idioms and a little Thesaurus.
Bab.la is really cool as well. Each meaning gets its own translation and a sentence in which the word is used with that specific meaning (also translated). There is a small list of similar words and a LOT of real-life sentences and their translations.
The only reason why I prefer WordReference to Bab.la is that the latter won't really "explain" what the word means, as you can find in normal dictionaries - it'll give you a plain translation instead, just like a synonym-dictionary would.
Michaelis dictionaries are quite famous in Brazil. They are widely used in schools, specially the Portuguese, Spanish and English ones.
I gotta say I don't like them very much. I've seen some (minor) errors there, not only in the bilingual dictionaries, but also in the Portuguese one. Also, they seem to be aimed at secondary students, so there are many less-usual words you won't find there.
Nonetheless, I think it's helpful and offers some useful idioms.
Reverso is a good bilingual dictionary as well. What I love about it are the idioms - there are so many of them! It's really organized and presents many different meanings of each word.
Downside: many really common words aren't registered there.
Linguee is interesting because it gathers real-life examples (each sentence comes with its source, by the way) and shows you the most common definitions in little pie charts. It's also helpful if you only have the conjugated form of a verb, since it can find the infinitive for you.
And there are, of course, the on-line translators. I wouldn't recommend using any of them, because they are only, well, translators - that is, they simply give you synonyms. No explanations, no examples...
Sometimes, however, all we need is a quick translation, right?
(I feel kinda stupid recommending these, since they're so famous, but anyway...)
That's about it. I'll make another post about monolingual dictionaries soon...
Hope you find this post useful!
See you! ;)
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