Friday 18 July 2014

Website & Vocabulary: Awesome Updates To The Cambridge Dictionary Online!!!


Cambridge Dictionaries Online
Image from Locky's English Playground
Remember back in the post IPA: Is It Possible to Have Primary-Stressed Vowels In An English Word? I told you how my ex-boss is a fervent supporter of the Oxford Dictionary and that I told you I only take all dictionaries as references? If you do, and you buy my philosophy, you are going to see the world of English a whole lot wider.

That being said, I still prefer to use Cambridge Dictionaries Online, initially for its simplicity in meanings and examples, to more distinctive fonts and colours for easy reading, to now...a hub for almost everything you can ask for!

Take for example, if you take a look at the image above, on the right sidebar you see SMART Thesaurus, click on the link and you will get a word cloud list as shown in the image below.

Cambridge Dictionaries Online
Image from Locky's English Playground
While the SMART Thesaurus has been around for quite a while, the next update is more recent.

English-Chinese Dictionary
Image from Locky's English Playground
Selecting English-Chinese before you search for a word, and you will have meanings and examples translated into Chinese for you! Of course, there are also French, German, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Korea, etc.

Cambridge Dictionaries Online
Image from Locky's English Playground
In the most recent update, if we return to the first image, you will now see Grammar bubbles right below the meanings and examples. Thus, when you are searching for a word, you can also learn the correct grammar when using it!

Say if I want to know when is "such" used as a determiner or what it means by a determiner, I can click on the respective bubble and ...

Cambridge Dictionaries Online
Image from Locky's English Playground

...you get all the key points worthy of your study time!!!

I really love Cambridge Dictionaries Online now! Even the mobile app has a bookmark function for you to store the words you want for quick revisits.


Resources:
IPA: Is It Possible to Have Primary-Stressed Vowels In An English Word? @ Locky's English Playground
http://lockyep.blogspot.com/2014/07/ipa-is-it-possible-to-have-primary.html

Learning Method: How to improve your English skills? (Writing) @ Locky's English Playground
http://lockyep.blogspot.hk/2009/08/learning-method-how-to-improve-your.html

Cambridge ADVANCED Learner's
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobisystems.msdict.embedded.wireless.cambridge.cald&hl=en

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/such_1?q=such