Firefly Spanish/English Visual Dictionary

My wife's primary language is Spanish, and she is learning English. My situation is the reverse of hers. My language by birth is English, and I am learning Spanish.

The Firefly Spanish/English Visual Dictionary is an indispensable book for both of us. It is so richly illustrated and well-organized that after using it, we have conveniently misplaced our other less visually-stimulating dictionaries.

The cool thing about this dictionary is that it is made by the same company that has also produced a popular reference book called The Concise Encyclopedia. Like Webster's Dictionary, this book is helpful to have around the household. It serves the purpose of a dictionary, yet is not burdened with lengthy descriptions of the things you wish to know about. Rather than describing these objects, The Concise Encyclopedia presents you with imaginatively-diagrammed pictures of the object. For example, let's presume that you want to understand terms used in the industry of aircraft construction. Instead of needing to research a stack of literature on the subject to locate relevant terms, you can simply find a picture of an airplane in The Concise Encyclopedia and study the terms that you find surrounding the picture.

The Firefly Spanish/English Visual Dictionary advances this same type of concept. It includes realistic, computer-generated illustrations that are marvelously lifelike. This dictionary is quite pioneering in this respect. Other illustrated dictionaries usually include cartoonish illustrations that are not intended to be accurate so much as they are intended to amuse you. However, the publishers of this dictionary have obviously gone through painstaking efforts to create illustrations so realistic that they almost pop off the page.

3 other features of this dictionary that are quite helpful is that each of its 28,000 Spanish words is designated as masculine or feminine in gender (how fantastic!), its 17 sections are color-coded for easy reference, and it is capped off with 2 indexes -- one in English and one in Spanish -- which help to even more easily locate particular words within the 17 sections of the book.

Aside from learning words in a foreign language, I have enjoyed studying the diagrams themselves to learn how things work in the world. Just as with The Concise Encyclopedia, all of the objects are diagrammed with the words of my first language, so if I tire of trying to memorize new Spanish words, I can always enjoy the dictionary purely as a source of fascinating information.

If you follow your curiosity as you study this book, you will be surprised at how much you will learn in a very short time. My only advice to anyone interested in learning Spanish is to supplement this book with 3 other resources: 1.) The book 501 Spanish Verbs, which will help you to properly conjugate almost any verb that you are likely to encounter in the Spanish language, and which contains valuable appendices offering guidelines for grammar, 2.) An updated university-level Spanish textbook, and 3.) The internet. If you turn to each of these resources in addition to The Firefly Spanish/English Visual Dictionary, you will have Spanish spilling out of your ears before you have enough time to even say "Muchas gracias."

And quickly after, it will be spilling from your mouth, too.