چرا و چه زمانی باید از دیکشنری انگلیسی استفاده کرد؟

Why and when to use an English dictionary?

Hello everyone, Elham’s here from Zabanshenas.com and today I’m gonna answer some questions that you guys ask all the time.

Why should I use an English to English dictionary and not a bilingual one?

When should I use it?

How should I use it?

I don’t understand these numbers and symbols in my dictionary. What do they mean? It’s confusing.

No, it’s not. I promise. Let’s start with this one!

I’ve answered this question in detail in another video before.

It’s all in Farsi, so if you haven’t watched it yet make sure you’ll check it out.

In general,English to English dictionaries contain a large amount of information for every word which is missing in bilingual dictionaries.

We don’t forbid you from using a bilingual dictionary specially if you are a beginner learner it’s good for a quick check but don’t make it a habit. Okay?

I wanna stress that if you really, really wanna build up your vocabulary quickly if you wanna have a very wide range of vocabulary use an English to English dictionary as much as you can.

It may seem a bit tricky to use at first but it will get easier as your level of language proficiency improves and believe me, you’re going to love it!

Plus, I’m going to teach you how to use them so no worries!

Question number 2: When should I use it?

You don’t always need to go look for every word.

If you do this for every word, it will take you a great deal of time and you may never reach the end of the text.

What I want you to do is try to guess the meaning of the word before going to the dictionary.

So first use the context. Look at the other words and see if they give you clues to the word’s meaning.

For example, take the sentence

“It was a very sultry day in the middle of summer.”

Read the entire sentence.

You probably understand each word except for “sultry”

Think about what you know about the summer.

‫It is likely that “sultry‬”, has something to do with weather.

It could be followed by the sentence

“The heat and humidity made it appealing to sit in the shade and drink lemonade.”

You can now more confidently define “sultry”.

The descriptive words such as “heat” and “humidity”‬ are further clues that it is a description of the weather.

You didn’t use a dictionary so just move on. Don’t worry about that word, it was easy. Now you have a new word in your head.

Sometimes you see a new word in a sentence and you can’t guess what it means but do you understand the whole paragraph?

Can you make sense of the whole paragraph without knowing the meaning of that specific word?

If yes, then it’s not an important word and you can skip it. Don’t look for it in the dictionary.

When should you look for this word in the dictionary? When you see it the second or third time.

When a word is repeated often enough that you know it’s a word that’s commonly used then yeah, look it up.

“To look up a word in the dictionary” means to search for its meaning.

And when you do that, when you search for a word in the dictionary suddenly you are given a lot of information about that word which leads us to the third question:

I don’t understand these explanations and numbers and symbols in my dictionary. What do they even mean?

I will tell you everything about them in the next video.

See you soon.

bye!