PONS Wörterbuch Bibliothek App Reviews

Maybe Ponds put some vocabulary in that dictonary, but in terms of user interface and usibility one wonders when ponds will go broke.

I was making a choice between two dictionary options PONS or SLOVOED. Slovoed has more languages to chose from, but the word count is smaller than it is in PONS. I was particularly insterested in Polish-English dictionary which is available as in-app purchases in both apps. PONS has it for 17 dollars and SlowEd has it for 15. However, PONS has almost 300 000 words with audio, sentence examples and categoriers of verbs, nouns and adjectives. Whereas, SlovoEd has 107 000 without categories with only plain translation that does not follow sentece example. Clearly PONS is a big winnger here. Keep in mind that it does not have so many languages as SlovoEd but it is much reacher in content.

I would gladly pay a premium price for a Pons pop-up dictionary that recognizes German morphology. Sadly, this is not that product. Although the content provider, Pons, is a top-notch, well-respected publisher, like Oxford in the U.K. or Webster in the U.S., the dictionary interface is supplied by Paragon, which, despite well over a decade of customer requests, has never extended its morphology module to cover German. This means that the utility of the pop-up feature — which is the main reason for buying a dictionary app in the first place — is all but useless, since German is a highly inflected language, with strong and weak verb conjugations and noun forms that frequently vary due to case declension, irregular plurals and compound forms. There are competing dictionary apps — including Abby for Mac and IOS, TranslateIt! for Mac and Langescheidt e-Großwörterbuch for PC — that do recognize German morphology variations. For the life of me I do not understand why a leading German publisher like Pons would license its content to a company like Paragon, rather than to a developer that is competent enough to figure out how to implement recognition of German grammatical variations. Does Pons really care so little about helping international students expand their vocabulary and master the complexities of the German language?