Dicionário Michaelis - Inglês 4+

Good dictionary, very weak program

This dictionary won’t serve the needs of either Portuguese speakers or of English speakers very well. First of all, since both languages have complicated orthographic and pronunciation systems, the lack of an IPA representation of the phonemes is a terrible weakness. There are recorded sounds instead, but the quality is so poor that I had trouble understanding the performance of several common English words. In addition, if the environment is noisy, like out on the street, you’re not going to hear these at all.

Second, and a fundamentally much more important problem, the dictionary is not built to know about inflected forms. Therefore, if you are an English speaker just beginning to study Portuguese, and try to find the word “vão” (an inflected form of ir), or you’re a Portuguese speaker just learning English and you search for “says” (an inflected form of say), the dictionary will neither find an entry for the word, nor will it make any suggestions of what else you might try. That is, this dictionary is not useful unless you already know all the inflected forms of the words: irregular plurals (oxen, for instance, can’t be found in the English dictionary), all inflected verb forms, and so on.

In addition, input is rigid and brittle with regard to orthography. If you search for “sao,” you won’t find anything, not even a suggestion. The orthographic rules require “são,” but that’s the sort of thing that a non-native speaker is trying to learn.

The history mechanism is very clunky. There’s no way to just use a keystroke or a button to go backward and forward in the history; you have to change to history mode to see the list. In addition, if you go back and forth between several nodes, each visit becomes a new entry in the history list, so the utility of the list gets smaller and smaller.

There is no support for linkage from words in the displayed definitions to a new search. That means that if a definition or an example includes words that you don’t know, you have to select them, copy them, and paste them into the search box. Not only that, but even if the dictionary includes the form of the word you’ve put into that search box, you can’t simply type the return key to initiate the search; you have to then click on the word in the match list.

There is no support of standard Mac text functions beyond select and copy. You can’t make use of the services menu, for instance, nor can you quickly look up a word using the Mac’s built-in dictionaries, nor can you use the native text-to-speech functions, nor can you pass a selected word to any other Mac program which might be of use to you.

Overall, I do not find it to be a good program, even though it may be based on a better dictionary than the one I’ve been using on both my Mac and my iOS devices for several years. That one is the Collins Pro English-Portuguese dictionary, released in the dictionary format of Ultralingua. That dictionary is not quite as strong a Portuguese dictionary as this one is, but the program that the content is presented is very, very much more solid and useable. I would suggest that you buy the Ultralingua product instead of this one, whether you are an English speaker trying to learn Portuguese, or a Portuguese speaker trying to learn English.

Developer Response ,

Dear user,

Thank you for your suggestions. We already forwarded it to our development team and to Editora Melhoramentos for consideration for the next version of the app.

If you have any other questions or comments, our team will be glad to assist you at www.aandh-software.com/suporte.

Sincerely,


Joaquim Oliveira
Technical Support - A&H Software Ltda.
suporte.michaelis@aandh-software.com
http://www.aandh-software.com