Dorling Kindersley Visual Dictionaries

[n_j_f]

Is anyone familiar with the Dorling Kindersley Visual Dictionaries? I was a bit disappointed at first with how physically small it was when the first one arrived in the post, but have found them indispensable for vocabulary acquisition. The first few editions I purchased — French and German — were printed in about 2005. These editions have "Visual" written on the right hand side of the text. They were re-designed in the last couple of years, with several new languages added (at least for the English editions). All of these have "Visual" written on the left instead. The most recent printing includes a free app (the icon is on the front page) and the following are available in English: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Russian. In addition, there is a useful "5 language" edition, which is English, French, German, Spanish and Italian in one. There are several more languages available in the German editions: Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Turkish, Latin, Persian (unfortunately, without IPA or a phonetic transcription), Danish and Dutch. I believe there is also editions in Russian, and perhaps other languages as well.

Having finally found a decent OCR program, I'm in the process of digitising the 5 Language edition to turn into flash cards. I noticed that the early editions say there are "6,000 words and phrases" whereas the more recent ones saying "10,000 words and phrases". As far as I can tell, the different editions only have different covers and the actual content is exactly the same.

Does anyone know how Dorling Kindersley account for the addition 4,000 words/phrases, and is there is a way of extracting the audio from the app and importing them onto Anki flashcards?

[aokoye]

...is there is a way of extracting the audio from the app and importing them onto Anki flashcards?

In a word, yes. I just tried with the German version my Android based phone and it was a matter of downloading the vocab (do this over wifi) then finding that and uploading it to my computer (which I did via Dropbox because apparently my phone doesn't want to let me connect to it via USB). It's in a zip file, which I didn't dig through the file system to find - I just looked in the "newest downloads" area of the file manager on my phone, there's a German titled one and an English one. I just unzipped it on my computer and it there are nearly 7,000 m4a files. The naming convention for the individual files is odd but it looks like they're grouped by page so it'd be easy enough (if not very tedious) to put the put the files in individual folders by page.

[Cavesa]

There are plenty in the Czech edition, I've got one, and also one from the German edition.

I was pretty disappointed, because vast majority of the content are nouns, while verbs could be included quite easily either. And the amount of words doesn't say much about their usefulness. For my use, there is too little detail. That's nice I can name a dozen sports, but I don't get there the vocabulary I'll need, if I actually visit a swimming pool or start taking tennis lessons. And I found a few mistakes in the French-Czech one, no idea whether that happens in other books of the Czech edition or the others.

If I were to quantify the review, 1 being the worst and 5 being the best:
Idea 5
Visual design 5
Content quality 3

I have a much better visual dictionary German-Czech that tries to combine the best from visual, classical, and thematic approach. It is bigger, with much more content, with not only nouns but as well example sentences. Too bad the publisher made only English and German ones.

[Seneca]

There are plenty in the Czech edition, I've got one, and also one from the German edition.

I was pretty disappointed, because vast majority of the content are nouns, while verbs could be included quite easily either. And the amount of words doesn't say much about their usefulness. For my use, there is too little detail. That's nice I can name a dozen sports, but I don't get there the vocabulary I'll need, if I actually visit a swimming pool or start taking tennis lessons. And I found a few mistakes in the French-Czech one, no idea whether that happens in other books of the Czech edition or the others.

If I were to quantify the review, 1 being the worst and 5 being the best:
Idea 5
Visual design 5
Content quality 3

I have a much better visual dictionary German-Czech that tries to combine the best from visual, classical, and thematic approach. It is bigger, with much more content, with not only nouns but as well example sentences. Too bad the publisher made only English and German ones.

Who is the publisher?

[Speakeasy]

A few years ago, I purchased a copy of “Le Nouveau Dictionnaire Visuel Multilingue” (French, English, Spanish, German, Italian) published by Les Éditions Québec Amérique Inc. https://www.quebec-amerique.com/livres/collections/reference-pratique/dictionnaires/le-nouveau-dictionnaire-visuel-multilingue-705.html It is comprised of 1,088 pages of multi-coloured illustrations, grouped thematically, including a multilingual index. Its dimensions are 8-1/2” x 11” x 2-1/2” and it weighs an astonishing 10 pounds. The publisher’s website does not yet include an application as does DK's

Two observations with respect to my own use of this tome: (a) the illustrations are detailed to such a remarkable extent that, in many cases, I do not possess the vocabulary in my mother tongue, English, and (b) owing to my preference for learning vocabulary through repeated exposure “in context”, I did not find the visual dictionary to be a particularly a useful device for learning/practicing/improving any of the languages therein. Okay, I could expand my English vocabulary through a more frequent exposure to the illustrations; however, I have managed to get by for the past 70 years without such detailed knowledge.

Despite my own experiences, I find n_j_f’s proposed use (Anki flashcards) both interesting and promising … und ich wünsche ihm viel Glück mit seinem Projekt!

[Cavesa]

Who is the publisher?

Fraus
https://ucebnice.fraus.cz/catalog/cs/sl ... jicsl.html

[n_j_f]

...is there is a way of extracting the audio from the app and importing them onto Anki flashcards?

In a word, yes. I just tried with the German version my Android based phone and it was a matter of downloading the vocab (do this over wifi) then finding that and uploading it to my computer (which I did via Dropbox because apparently my phone doesn't want to let me connect to it via USB). It's in a zip file, which I didn't dig through the file system to find - I just looked in the "newest downloads" area of the file manager on my phone, there's a German titled one and an English one. I just unzipped it on my computer and it there are nearly 7,000 m4a files. The naming convention for the individual files is odd but it looks like they're grouped by page so it'd be easy enough (if not very tedious) to put the put the files in individual folders by page.

Great, thanks for the tip. I am a complete techno-peasant (that succinct title is courtesy of Speakeasy), but I may just be able to figure out how to do that.

[n_j_f]

A few years ago, I purchased a copy of “Le Nouveau Dictionnaire Visuel Multilingue” (French, English, Spanish, German, Italian) published by Les Éditions Québec Amérique Inc. https://www.quebec-amerique.com/livres/collections/reference-pratique/dictionnaires/le-nouveau-dictionnaire-visuel-multilingue-705.html It is comprised of 1,088 pages of multi-coloured illustrations, grouped thematically, including a multilingual index. Its dimensions are 8-1/2” x 11” x 2-1/2” and it weighs an astonishing 10 pounds. The publisher’s website does not yet include an application as does DK's

Two observations with respect to my own use of this tome: (a) the illustrations are detailed to such a remarkable extent that, in many cases, I do not possess the vocabulary in my mother tongue, English, and (b) owing to my preference for learning vocabulary through repeated exposure “in context”, I did not find the visual dictionary to be a particularly a useful device for learning/practicing/improving any of the languages therein. Okay, I could expand my English vocabulary through a more frequent exposure to the illustrations; however, I have managed to get by for the past 70 years without such detailed knowledge.

Despite my own experiences, I find n_j_f’s proposed use (Anki flashcards) both interesting and promising … und ich wünsche ihm viel Glück mit seinem Projekt!

Although I find myself going overboard with vocabulary acquisition in a foreign language (i.e. learning words I know I will probably never use much), it's actually helped me to some extent with my native language. For example, being able to use the correct name for something rather than some long-winded explanation like "you know, that thing that goes into the other thing that sits on the thing that goes round and round the other thing". It's also a fun exercise being able to identify trees, flowers, animals, etc. by name and/or sight; admittedly, this is more for personal interest and not overly useful, so I try and do this concurrently or sequentially with something like Routledge's Frequency dictionaries.

[Doitsujin]

Does anyone know how Dorling Kindersley account for the addition 4,000 words/phrases, and is there is a way of extracting the audio from the app and importing them onto Anki flashcards?

I don't know if you bought the same version of the DK dictionary that I did (I had to scan the bar code in order to download the audio files), however, IIRC, the iOS version of the app will download all (.m4a) audio files, which you can extract with 7Zip from the .ipa file, if you transfer the complete app folder with a third party tool (e.g. Syncios) to your computer. (The .ipa file also contains .xml files with the text of each word and references to the audio files in the source and target languages.)

[PeterMollenburg]

I dusted off my DK French-English bilingual visual dictionary recently for vocab acquisition purposes. I too wondered why mine claims 6000 words and the newer ones 10000 words when the appear similar.... I haven't worked it out yet.

In the meantime I grew curious about multi-lingual visual dictionaries and bypassed those with Italian, as I'm not intending to learn it any time soon and went with a Van Dale (Dutch publisher) multi-lingual visual dictionary as it contains English plus all the European languages I've already dabbled in at some point and wish to continue with in future including Dutch instead of Italian:
English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch.

It contains an impressive 22,500 words in the 5 languages, and the detail is impressive. I would've preferred a larger textbook size book, but it's still much bigger than the small DK books. It's between a paperback novel size and a textbook. Very happy with the purchase.
Van Dale:
https://webwinkel.vandale.nl/jean-claude-corbeil-van-dale-groot-beeldwoordenboek
Same book on Amazon UK:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/beeldwoordenboek-Nederlands-English-Français-Deutsch/dp/9460773060