Review of the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary CD-ROM

This review describes the 4th edition of the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary CD-ROM (published in late 2003). If you have the 3rd edition (2001), check out what's new in this edition.

<< See our review of the book

The content

We love software dictionaries, so we were very excited to learn about the software version of the excellent Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary from HarperCollins Publishers. As we expected, the CD-ROM has the same great definitions and example sentences as the paper edition. You can read more about them in our review of the book version. Here, we'll just quote part of it:

When you look up a word in a dictionary, you should be interested in what the word means. But you should also ask the question "What can I do with it?". The [Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary] answers this question very well by giving the most important phrases and grammar structures containing the word — both in the definition and example sentences. Together, the definition and the example sentences give you an almost complete picture of how a word is used in the English language.

The CD-ROM also contains a "Wordbank" — a collection of sentences from English-language books, articles, conversations, etc. The Wordbank is part of the "Bank of English", a much larger collection which HarperCollins used to create the definitions and choose the example sentences in the dictionary.

screenshot showing an example sentence for 'weltanschauung'

The Wordbank is a very useful thing. It gives you lots of example sentences, and, if you are a reader of Antimoon, you should know that example sentences are the proper way to learn English words. The Wordbank is especially helpful when the dictionary doesn't explain a word, or when it doesn't give enough example sentences. For example, the dictionary does not explain weltanschauung, but we found a nice example sentence in the Wordbank (see picture to the right).

The CD-only version (called the "Resource Pack") also contains the Collins COBUILD Guide to English Usage, the Collins COBUILD English Grammar, and a thesaurus.

No phonetic transcriptions

The software does not contain phonetic transcriptions (unlike the book version). The editors thought that if the dictionary has recordings, phonetic transcriptions are unnecessary. Big mistake! There are three reasons why we think removing the transcripton was a bad move:

Your ears are not perfect. Even if the dictionary has high-quality recordings, it is always good to see all the sounds in a word. Sometimes you hear a "t"; then somebody tells you it should be a "d", and then you start hearing a "d".
Recordings are never perfect. The ones in CCED are of a high quality, but it's still difficult to recognize the sounds in some words. For example, here is the recording for the word back. Not very clear, is it? Phonetic transcription (//) is always clear, because it represents each English sound with a different symbol.
In order to listen to a recording, you have to turn on your computer's speakers. Then you have to press a key (Ctrl+W) or click an icon in the program window. This is too much work if you want to look up something fast. If the dictionary had phonetic transcriptions, you could just quickly read it.

Because there are no phonetic transcriptions, the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary CD-ROM cannot be your only dictionary. You will have to use another software dictionary (or the paper version of the CCED) to learn pronunciation. (You should use many dictionaries anyway, so this is not a huge problem.)

Recordings

The software has British audio recordings for all words. American recordings are available only for some words, for example:

lieutenant, resource, advertisement, dog, new, flashlight

Here are some words for which only a British recording is available (even though all these words are pronounced differently in American English):

car, heart, fire, hour, hair, near, lot, claw, more, lure, turn, forget, castle, fast

We liked one thing about the recordings: You can listen to all the forms of a word (only in British English). For example, in the page for open there is a recording for open, but also for opens, opening, and opened. Many learners pronounce such inflected forms incorrectly, so the recordings can be helpful.

The software lets you record your own speech and compare it with the recordings. This is a helpful feature, because it lets some learners notice the mistakes they make in pronunciation. Of course, because the dictionary contains so few American recordings, the feature will be useful mostly for learners of British English.

Looking up words

Some CD-ROM dictionaries have complicated graphical interfaces, which are difficult to learn and to use. (The idea is that customers want "multimedia", and a simple Windows interface is not multimedia enough.) Fortunately, the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's Dictionary CD-ROM is different. There are no colorful animations — just a small, fast, reliable, easy-to-use interface, which supports the main function of a dictonary: looking up words.

The software lets you look up words really quickly. You can simply type a word and press Enter. You never have to press an additional key beforehand. With most dictionaries, you have to press a key every time you want to look up a word. When you look up a lot of English words, it really is a problem.

However, the search does not always work well. For example, if you try to look up the phrase "fall to pieces", the dictionary will show the page for the word fall. The page has explanations of 21 meanings of the word and you have to find the right meaning yourself ("fall to pieces" is number 20).

The dictionary has a nice feature called "full-text search". It searches for a word or phrase in all the parts of the CD-ROM: the entries, definitions and examples in the dictionary, the Wordbank, the Collins English Usage, etc.

Install to hard drive

The setup program has an "install to hard drive" option. In our opinion, the option is necessary for every serious learner. Here's why:

If you want to learn a lot of words, looking them up should be easy. If it's too hard, you will ignore many words because you will be scared of the time and effort (paper dictionaries are scary like that). This means that your dictionary should be quickly available. You should be able to look up a word in a few seconds. An application on a CD is not "quickly available", because:

It takes time to insert the CD into your CD-ROM drive.

So if you want to use your dictionary comfortably, you need to have it on your hard drive. Many dictionaries are quite difficult to install to the hard drive (often you have to edit the Windows registry), but the CCED CD-ROM makes it all easy by having a special option in the setup.

Poor copying & pasting

You cannot select part of a page (for example, one definition or one example sentence) and copy it to another program. When you're making a SuperMemo item, you have to copy the entire page with the option "Copy entry". If a word has 100 meanings, you have to copy 400 lines of text. Then you have to erase 399 lines to leave only the one that you want.

We don't know if this is a programming error or some kind of copy protection. Maybe HarperCollins did not want people to copy their definitions?

Bugs

There is only one annoying bug in the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary. Under Windows XP, there is a 5-second pause when you first try to play a recording. Afterwards, all recordings play immediately. Otherwise, the software is fast and reliable.

Conclusions

We recommend the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary CD-ROM. In our opinion, it is a good software English dictionary for learners. The content is excellent — great example sentences and definitions from the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary plus the Wordbank with even more examples. The program's interface is quite good, so you can look up English words quickly and pleasantly.

The CCED CD-ROM is a source of super-friendly and super-clear definitions and example sentences, but not of phonetic transcriptions. If you're learning English pronunciation, you will also need another software dictionary with transcriptions (or the book version of the CCED).

Prices

You can get the following versions of the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary, 4th edition:

Hardcover + CD — buy from Elearnaid ($26) or Amazon.co.uk ($42)
Paperback + CD — buy from Elearnaid ($19) or Amazon.co.uk ($22)
CD only — buy from Elearnaid ($10) — Available at a great price. We only recommend this version if you have another dictionary with phonetic transcriptions (the CD does not have transcriptions).
Resource Pack on CD (includes dictionary, thesaurus, grammar and usage) — buy from Elearnaid ($29) — We only recommend this version if you have another dictionary with phonetic transcriptions (the CD does not have transcriptions).

Shipping information: Elearnaid's shipping charges are lower than Amazon's if you live in America, Asia or Eastern Europe. If you live in Western Europe, Amazon's shipping will be cheaper by about $4 and the delivery will be somewhat faster. Warning: Elearnaid does not ship to a few countries, e.g. Poland and India.

We would like to thank Maree Airlie and Jennifer Kidd of HarperCollins Publishers for providing copies of the 3rd and 4th editions of the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary.