Product Description

The world's best-selling little dictionaries

• Have confidence -- find all the words and phrases you need

• Get there fast -- clear layout now with color

• Go further -- extra help with Irish grammar

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1386223 in Books
• Published on: 1995-10-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Turtleback
• 248 pages

Language Notes
Text: English

From the Publisher
More than 28,000 references and 49,000 translations.

About the Author

HarperCollins Publishers is one of the world's leading English-language publishers with headquarters in New York. The company is part of News America Publishing Group, a division of News Corporation. The house of Mark Twain, the Bronte Sisters, Thackeray, Dickens, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Maurice Sendak, HarperCollins was founded in New York City in 1817 by the brothers James and John Harper. The worldwide book group, which was formed following News Corporation's acquisition of the British publisher William Collins in January 1990, has significant publishing interests in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia.

Customer Reviews

Handy Irish Dictionary--NOT a Course in Gaelic
Collins Gem Irish Dictionary, editors Séamus Mac Mathúna and Ailbhe O' Corráin is a user friendly, comprehensive up-to-date wordlist of English-Irish to Irish-English. It's a dictionary for looking up words just like the Webster or the Oxford. It does NOT contain any pronunciations of the words in Irish. It does contain abbrevations. The middle section is useful Irish grammar that includes extensive tables of regular and irregular verbs and noun declensions and key English words makes it an invaluable reference tool. The back section contains numbers used in counting and with nouns and time.

If you are learning to speak the Irish Gaelic language, I'd recommended you to try a lesson course with book that has pronunciations and a cassette to follow along. Some tips would be 'Learning Irish' by Micheal O'Siadhail, 'Irish Grammar' by Noel Mogonagle and 'Irish on Your Own' by Eamon O'Donaill. Some of these can help on the basics of learning the language. This compact source is handy to carry around with you if you're traveling. It seems to sell fairly well in Ireland where I got my copy while in Dublin. My other option to learning the language is to take a course well in a creditable school that teaches it. Also check through Eason & Sons in Ireland for Gaelic textbooks. Eason.ie is an excellent source in Irish books.

The best and cheapest Irish dictionary available
This is one of the few accessible Irish dicitonaries available, and one of the very few which does not presume past study of Irish. It is ideal for the American or Canadian learner, who don't always have access to native speakers or supplementary material. The multi-colored format makes searching for idioms and prepositional phrases easier, and it's refreshing to have the Irish-English and English-Irish in one volume. The only flaws I see are the failure to print the English meanings alongside the Irish headings in the verb charts, and the lack of a guide to pronunciation. Collins-Gem's Welsh dictionary is also ahead of the pack, making this company a leader in sensible and practical dictionaries for the Celtic languages.

--Antone

Not bad, but more is needed
What is good about Collins Gem? Well, there are modern terms for modern things, many probably only coined for this dictionary. Not all of them are very good, but most are good enough. Sometimes, I have been somewhat irritated that the book has not utilised the terminology found in "Foclóir scoile" and "Foclóir Póca" extensively enough. Besides, the choice of entries has more to do with UK and Northern Ireland than with Ireland. And it is not only more obscure words that aren't found - the English-Irish section often doesn't have even quite common or everyday words. It looks, alas, that there really isn't a quite satisfactory pocket dictionary of Irish. If the Langenscheidt team would try it, they would probably be able to compile one very good pocket dictionary by combining this with Foclóir Scoile.