Jo Rhys-Jones
Kingswear Primary
Summer 2005
USING A BILINGUAL DICTIONARY - 1
If I needed to find out what a new word such as ‘dog’ is in French what should I do? One
of the best places to look is in a special dictionary which is in both French and English,
called a bilingual dictionary.
A bilingual dictionary is divided into two halves, usually the first half is an alphabetical list
of words in French, with their meanings in English. The second half is also in alphabetical
order, this time of words in English, with their meanings in French.
To find out the French for the word ‘dog’ I would have to look in the second half, the
English part. This is what I found;
dog [dug] 1 n chien(ne) m(f); [fox etc.] male m. to lead a ~’s life mener une
vie de chien; 2 adj. collar de chien; food, biscuit pour chien; ~basket panier m
de chien.
What does all this mean?
[dug] - The first letters, usually in brackets like these, tells you how to pronounce the
English word -this would be very useful to a foreigner. Sometimes the writing in
these brackets looks upside-down or back-to-front. This is because the letters are
not in English, they are called phonetics. We can ignore this bit.
1
- The first definition or sometimes the first choice of similar definitions.
n
- This stands for noun. It means that the word we want is an object, not a verb.
chien - The word we are looking for, this is the French word for ‘dog’.
(ne)
- This is a short way of writing ‘chienne’ which is the word for a female dog.
m
this
- This stands for masculin. All nouns in French are either masculine or feminine, so
also tells us which word to use for ‘the’ - ‘le’ so ‘the dog’ = ‘le chien’.
(f)
- This stands for feminin. It reminds us that the word in brackets which means a
female
dog becomes a feminine noun and would need the word ‘la’ to translate ‘the’. So if
we wanted to write ‘the dog’ about a female dog we should write ‘la chienne’.
Then the dictionary goes on to give us other definitions of the word ‘dog’, including how to
say ‘to lead a dog’s life’ which is an English saying and the word for a ‘dog-basket’. What
do you think ‘adj.’ stands for later in the definition?
Use a bilingual dictionary to find the French for these words;
1.
2.
cat
pig
3.
4.
rabbit
sheep
5.
6.
monkey
parrot
7.
8.
cow
gerbil