Dictionary German PREMIUM

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The raw dictionary capabilities of PONS are great. I use it a lot and it has most of the words I need. I've been using some version of it for 6 years. However, it has a long history of underwhelming development. First, it doesn't provide pronunciation for all words, which is ridiculous at the price. Second, it is always behind in development. They focus on tricks and trash rather than what is useful. Example: You can use a pen to enter words, but it's very flaky and ultimately a big waste of time. So they have wasted their time on very poor handwriting support. However, they have no support for iOS 9 -- you can't split the screen with another app, there are no keyboard shortcuts for the iPad Pro, etc. All of that would have been really helpful. This has been the history for at lest 6 years across several platforms. The bottom line is that it is an excellent dictionary, stuck inside a very poor dictionary engine (which is shared by many dictionary apps). And someone made a bad decision about eliminating so many of the pronunciations.

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I shelled out $50 for this app, assuming it gave highly accurate translations and nuances of words and phrases. I’ve shared many of these with native German speakers and they are AGHAST at how utterly fallacious many of the translations and renderings of phrases are. Quick example: one does not say “Spachtel” for a cooking spatula. My hotel clerk, from whom I needed a spatula yesterday for my kitchenette, had no idea what I was on about and was aghast at the dictionary. The proper word is “Pfannenwender.” Don’t get me started on the various phrases. It’s indeed upsetting to pay so much money for a product, which has all the trappings of accuracy and rigor, only to discover its many flagrant, egregious mistranslations and infelicities!

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Slow starting app, very basic words and almost 90% of them with no pronunciation, no verb conjugations, and many definitions are just one or two words! It is by no means a dictionary. Really not. There are many better and cheaper apps out there with more functionality. I wish I could have a refund.. To developer: I thought PONS is a good and respected company. Now I don't feel the same. You're not only loosing a customer, you're destroying your reputation.

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The last major update caused all sorts of problems. Now it takes forever to launch. Such a pain when I need to find a word quickly. Not only that, the new way that the app suggests words that you are searching for is far inferior compared to how it used to be. It tries to be “smart” and guess the word you are looking for. In the process, it hides words that actually start with the letters you are typing. An actual example to illustrate: type “selb” (the first four letters in the word “selbst”). Do you see “selbst” anywhere in the list of words you might be searching for? No. Just “Gelb” and “gelb”, because it’s guessing you meant those. If I want to get to the definition for the word “selbst”, I have to keep typing letters until it finally gets the hint. The app should *always* display words that begin with the letters I am typing, not just try to guess what I am trying to type. What’s more, this is a dictionary - I *want* to see the words that come right before and after the word “selbst” when I’m searching for that word, because sometimes it helps me learn other words that are related to it. Search used to work correctly in an earlier version. Now it is horribly broken. What’s worse, I tried to contact the developer and explained these exact problems with a very detailed write up and screenshots to illustrate. I was just brushed off. That was several months ago. Still nothing has changed. Be careful where you spend your money, this is probably not the dictionary for you, unless they decide to get their act together and address the user interface problems and dreadfully slow startup times.

This has everything you could want. The content is from the best source possible for a German dictionary- PONS GmbH. The definitions are clear and well-formatted. There are a huge number of examples. There is built-in audio for many words. Everything is hyperlinked. There are cheaper dictionaries in the PONS series if this one is too expensive (Advanced/Basic/etc). But if you want the best, I'd guess this is probably it.