Being dumfoundly asked by a casual cyber-friends about the difference between
in future and in the future, and suggested by an English teacher that one of the
suggestions for the correct comprehension of word meaning is to use an up-to-date and adequate monolingual dictionary, I am beginning to ponder over whether I
should buy one to proceed English study in the future instead of the E-dictionary I have used for many years. By now, I’ve never bought those authoritative and
monolingual dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary, yet, I would like to make a rough comparison between monolingual, bilingual and E-dictionary on
the basis of my limited knowledge and immature thoughts.
A monolingual dictionary, written entirely in English and extensive enough so
that words are detailedly defined with the fullest degree, is of great indispensability for those who aim at getting a correct understanding of the lexical meaning of English words. We know, the lexical meaning between any two languages is
seldom so simple that words rarely can be equated on a one-to-one basis, for which is likely to result numerous misinterpretations. Take the word wise for example; it is exactly defined in OALD (Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary) that “
Having or showing experience, knowledge, good judgement….”, so one can say “
a wise man” but not “ a wise boy”. Yet the meaning of wise is rendered into Chinese as “聪明的，智慧的”, hence most of the Chinese students tend to make such ridiculous comments as “ My little sister is very wise”. If they have looked up the word wise in an English-English dictionary, they would not have used that word in that way.
Non-native speakers tend to assume that the more convenient way of learning word meaning is by the use of a bilingual dictionary (English-Chinese). Me included. Once I used one or two which are especially composed for taking some certain
English exams. Such dictionaries do serve a useful purpose in providing word with meaning or, the commonest usage by illustrating one or two followed, even supplementary exercises to strengthen it, but by contrast, they usually contain only
word-for-word translations of the meanings of English words. It may just be among the possible reasons why we Chinese learners have been accustomed to write and speak in Chinglish, not idiomatic and native English. Beyond all questions it
is unescapable but should conquer day by day.
With the emergence of E-dictionary in China, the English dictionaries market has been gradually dominated by it presently. And most people may regard it as the most convenient way of getting at word meaning. Sometimes the same English word may have a different meaning in Chinese, and undoubtedly the accurate meaning
of a word is mainly effected by what goes before and comes after. Furthermore, the English language consists of much more than just vocabulary. Hereby even if E
-dictionaries enable us to know the diverse Chinese meanings of a word efficiently, we are still quite obsessed with what the heck the Chinese meanings it conveys in a sentence. What’s much worse is all the Chinese meanings of a work have
been rooted on one’s mind by frequently looking up in E-dictionary, but he doesn’t has a good command of using it in proper way.
Having outlined three types of the English dictionaries above, I seriously think that it may be much better to own all of them at the same time, in order to get at the lexical meaning, correct usage of a word to the full. A dictionary is
just a tool, and the function of a dictionary is to sever the person who consults it. So we are supposed to choose and use this tool rightly.
Nicole
