Prisma’s Abridged English-Swedish and Swedish-English Dictionary

This appears to be a comprehensive dictionary (if that's possible) in that its quite "fat" and has a high number of words in each language. It is well bound and looks like it will last for many years. Having said that, its a bit strange that it had to come all the way from the USA (University of Minnesota press) and that no European publisher seems to have the equivalent in print. Anyway, other reviews have given this 5 stars and I wonder why. The thing is, in Swedish, one of the real complexities is plurals and somewhat unhelpfully, except for irregular ones, plurals are NOT shown with the word itself. Instead it shows that a noun belongs to one of 9 groups and you need to refer this group list to find out what the plural is. And this is where the notes in the dictionary fail because they do not define how these groups are put together. Other even basic grammar books have at least attempted to explain the rationale behind the group (so that you can in future work out with some accuracy what the plural might be). Another failing is the lack of use of the international phonetic system for pronunciation. Instead it falls back on a widely discredited system of using English approximations when, by its own admission, there no equivalents in some cases! This is particularly bad for a language like Swedish where there are some tricky phonics with some variations so accurate pronunciation is vital to being understood. It is this sort of poor/inaccurate work that you can find all over the internet. So this is ok but online/electronic dictionaries like folkets ordbok and folkets lexicon seem to be more helpful in providing declensions with the word.

I bought this book to help me with reading Swedish literature, (specifically the "Millenium" trilogy by Stieg Larsson), newspapers and the like.This is an excellent, comprehensive and, as far as I can tell, accurate dictionary. Both the Swedish - English and English - Swedish sides appear to be on equal footing, (though I have not had much opportunity to use the English - Swedish side) and unlike other dictionaries on the market this doesn't appear to have been written solely for Swedish people who are learning English.The layout is intuitive and easy to use, but it does take some getting used to. Instead of giving the gender and plurals of each word individually, they are instead assigned a code. These codes are along the lines of "a1, a2..." for adjectives, "v1, v2..." for verbs and so on. At the front of the dictionary, in the "how to use this book" section, each code is explained in detail. So, for example;s1 (nouns) - flicka - flickaN - flickOR (The actual explanations do use more than one example)s2 - pojke - pojkeN - pojkARSo, when looking up a word, for instance "kväll", you will see next to it the code "s2" and if you flip to the front of the book, you will be able to figure out that the plural of "kväll" is "kvällar."Unfortunately the codes are only available in the Swedish - English side of the dictionary. Therefore, if one wants to look up an English word, let's take "rabble" as a random example, one must first look in the English - Swedish section to find the translation ("pack" in my example) then look up the translated word in the Swedish - English section to find out it's inflection pattern (s7 in this example.) This may sound like a bit of a faff, and at times it certainly is, but after you've got used to it, it does indeed get a lot simpler.So to sum up; comprehensive, accurate, portable (which is a delightful bonus) and on the whole easy to use. Also, at just over £10 it's well worth the money!

Very good, useful and handy dictionary with good words explanation, phrases and proverbs as well.

I am English learning Swedish (Svenska) and I found this great for carrying around and thinking as i do when I talk to others I try to incorporate my Swedish to help my learning and fluency. I noticed however that the Swedish to English for English learners was more detailed than the learning Swedish section. However still great and no problems so far, would recommend to anyone beginner or advanced.

Have been taking a class for 9 months and decided we needed a decent dictionary - this one is great. It has enough extra reference material to make it just what we needed.

I find it easy to use, well presented and - for its size - acceptably comprehensive.

Really a very good dictionary.

This is not a good dictionary for those learning Swedish. My Swedish teacher recommended it on the basis on someone else's recommendation, but having seen my copy will not recommend it again. The book is clearly designed with only Swedes in mind and is therefore not suited to English speakers learning Swedish. There are no phonetic pronunciation notes on the Swedish words, many words appear to be in odd locations, eg 'igar' (sorry, can't make the correct symbol here to put the circle on top of the a), for 'yesterday' isn't found under 'i', but you have to look up 'gar' and then it shows it with the i at the beginning. It is not possible to know to do this when learning a language! The biggest issue though is that it does not show whether nouns are 'en' or 'ett' words so it is impossible to know how to form any of their derivatives - my teacher was amazed, and I'm deeply annoyed that this can be marketed as "one of the best dictionaries of it's type around".