dictionaries and foreign languages

[cellio]

Last night I wanted to know the meaning of a Hebrew word (that I really ought to have known). When I ask Dani these kinds of questions he usually says "why don't you look it up in the dictionary?", so this time I went straight to the dictionary. Then I realized that the answer to his usual question is "because dictionaries only work if you know how to spell". The word I was looking up had four letters (that is, consonants), and three of them were ambiguous. (Hebrew has several pairs of letters that -- especially to foreigners -- are homophones.) Of the three ambiguous ones, my intuition was only correct for one of them. Oops.

Comments

Re:

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

well, Jeanne beat me to it and answered better than I would have, so I'll just defer to her better judgement!