This dictionary is really a bunch of mp3’s, formatted as 10-second songs. There are three “artists”, a German-English dictionary (with 26 album names corresponding to the letters of the alphabet), an English-German dictionary (formatted in the same way), and lists of commonly used words, where the album names are set to various popular topics.
Installing the mp3’s requires that they be imported to iTunes, which meant I had to set up separate playlists for the dictionary and for my regular music, else if I wanted to shuffle, I’d have 5000 tracks of dictionary entries interspersed with my songs. I tried to avoid this difficulty by copying the “Copy to iTunes” folder on the disc directly to my iPod, but it didn’t work, so I instead followed the directions (which were to restructure my music library). The directions suggest using the Sync option, but I have way too many songs to possibly fit on my 1GB iPod, so I used the manual sync and dragged over my new German Dictionary playlist. The German-English translation and the English-German translation are separate tracks, as are the words in the topical playlists, so if I word happens to be in all three, that’s three separate tracks.
The dictionary is pretty impressive. The words (i.e., the “song titles”) scroll across the screen while the voice speaks the English text, then the German, then the German again, then the English. The voice also includes the German articles, which I greatly appreciate. Scrolling across the screen is the word, the plural form, and the part of speech (e.g., prep. for preposition). That being said, I had to set my backlighting to turn off “never” and stare at the screen continuously to get all the information I would need.
What attracted me first off were the lists of commonly used words (e.g., clothing, food, transportation, etc.). I played the “Town & City” list and the “Transportation” list continuously on the way to write my German test (on “Travel”, which was not an option). With these two lists, still about half the words my textbook thinks I should know were not included, nor were they in the iPod’s regular German-English dictionary (I’m using “Wie Geht’s, 8th ed.). Of course, I don’t think McGraw-Hill would be allowed to correlate their dictionary with a Thomson-Heinle text, and choosing what words are going to be more “important” to include is certainly not going to be simple. One odd choice, however, was to include “merry-go-round” (das Karussell) amongst things I might like to inquire about while I’m in a town or city. I’m sure there’s something that should have been prioritized above that (e.g., “Restaurant”, while in the dictionary, is not in this list). There is, among these tracks, perhaps more repetition than there should be; for instance, in transportation, I have two tracks corresponding to two English words for the same one in German⎯gas and petrol, “das Benzin”, are two separate tracks, as are “gas pump” and “petrol pump”.
The disc itself made a worrisome grinding noise in my MacBook, as tends to happen with discs that are slightly warped. It took half an hour to copy the tracks off the disc into iTunes (which is standard, according to the instructions). I don’t want to have to do that again, so I’ll probably leave the dictionary in my iTunes forever. It takes up more than half of my 1GB (912MB) iPod, though (at 490 MB), so it will likely be prioritized off of that in the near future.
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