Nombre: ______________________________
Clase: __________
Mi amigo el diccionario
The dictionary can be a wonderful friend in Spanish class, but you have to know how to use it to your
advantage! Google Translate is a machine – whatever you tell it, it translates. It does not actually speak the
language!! Often times translators cannot take into account the context of your sentence or linguistic
differences between languages. Unfortunately, you cannot simply look up a word in your bilingual dictionary
and take the first translation you see. Here are some helpful hints to help you make the most of your
dictionary friend.
1) You already know that nouns in Spanish come in many forms: masculine, feminine, plural, singular, etc. So
you must know the difference! For example, you may not find a dictionary entry for the word camarera, so
you need to replace the feminine ending -a with the masculine -o, and then when you look up camarero, you'll
find it means "waiter," so camarera obviously means "waitress." Another example would be if you wanted to
look up the adjective verdes. The adjective verdes is plural, so remove the -s and look up verde, to discover it
means "green."
2) You also know that verbs come originally in the infinitive form. For example you first learned the verb
hablar means “to talk”. Your dictionary will not be able to tell you what nosotros hablamos means. You
would need to know that hablamos comes from hablar and look that up instead. So as another example,
when you wonder what tú tocas means, you have to consider that tocas is a verb conjugation, so the infinitive
is probably tocar, tocer, or tocir - look those up to learn that tocar means "to touch."
3) Some homonyms can even be two different parts of speech. The English word "produce," for example, can
be a verb (They produce a lot of cars) or a noun (They have the best produce). When you look up the word
"produce," you'll see at least two Spanish translations: the Spanish verb is prosucir and the noun is productos
(agrícolas). If you don't pay attention to the part of speech of the word you want to translate, you may end up
with a big grammatical mistake in whatever you're writing.
4) The abbreviations are not gibberish! You will see many abbreviations in an entry. Some include n., adj.,
adv., and v. Some of these will be obvious to you (n = noun, adj = adjective, etc.). Some will be more obscure,
for example Sch. is an abbreviation for something having to do with school. The very front of your dictionary
will help you decipher these abbreviations, which are important in helping you find the very best translation
for what you are trying to say.
5) For more information, try looking up a word both ways. For example, if you look up "beans," your
dictionary might offer judías and habichuelas as the Spanish translations. When you look up these two words
in the Spanish-to-English part of the dictionary, you'll find that habichuelas means "beans," while judías
can mean "beans" in Spain or "green beans" as judías verdes is more common than simply judías.
What were they trying to say??
Use your dictionary to try and figure out what these people really wanted to say!
1) María olor la rosa.
2) En cualquier caso, nosotros somos rotos arriba.
3) Abe Lincoln es un hombre extraordinario y un buen plomo.
4) Es el lugar en que lava todo el cuerpo. –Es el chubasco.
5) ¡Congelación! ¡Policía!
6) Todo el mundo izquierda.
7) ¡No voy a embarazar tú!