Students of German: Beware! Stay Away!

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?

Jerome Alton Carney about PONS Wörterbuch Bibliothek