Franklin BES-1890 Speaking Spanish-English Dictionary

I am a beginner, never having taken Spanish at school. I am an engineer by profession and speak 2 languages (English and Afrikaans) but I am no linguist. Early last year I went on a Habitat for Humanity trip to Honduras, and went through a short teach-yourself-Spanish course beforehand, which I found made my trip a lot more fun, even though we had several Spanish speakers available. So, when my wife suggested in April that we go on our own to Nicaragua last December for 3 weeks for our 20th anniversary, I dived back into the language. (My wife does not speak Spanish). I went through all 3 of the Pimsleur Spanish audio courses (great fun & recommended) and started several book courses. (Ultimate Spanish -Beginner by Living Language is well done, as is “Spanish Verb Tenses”, by Richmond. The Ultimate Spanish CDs I found hard to follow – not as good as Pimsleur). In addition, I looked around for a portable electronic dictionary, since I realized I would need this in Nica. I settled on the BES-1890, even though I could find only 2 reviews, neither very positive.

I purchased this about 4 months ago, and have used it daily for the first 3 months – sometimes many times a day. It is a remarkable product, but takes some getting used to. I have several travel dictionaries – some are pocket sized (about 30,000 words), another is the New World Spanish/English dictionary (4”x7”x2.25” thick – too big for one’s pocket - 70,000 words). Overall, the BES beats all my dictionaries in several areas, but it does have some weaknesses (which are minor). Overall, I give this a 4/5. I would add that I rate it as one of the coolest electronic gadgets I have had in years – up there with my Ipod Nano 3G, my Garmin GPSmap76 (for kayaking), and my Bose Qc2 noise canceling headphones.

I found it a great asset on my lunchtime walks. I would be listening to Pimsleur on my headphones, which is fun and a great way to learn, but every so often, they would use a word the root of which was not obvious. Example – they taught me “lo siento, quise llamarte” (I am sorry, I meant to call you). I could not place the word “quise”, and my pocket dictionary (which is the largest one I could take on my walk) did not list “quise”. By the time I got back home (to my big dictionary), I had usually forgotten which word to look up. However, when I started taking along the BES on my walks, I could stop and look up these words on the spot. (I found that quise comes from querer). Another example- Pimsleur teaches one to use “tenga que” in place of “tiene que” (for “have to”) if it is uncertain. They did not explain this. The BES helped me understand that this is the subjunctive form. Such help on my walks made the Pimsleur courses more meaningful.

One evening, in our excellent San Thomas hotel in Matagalpa, we borrowed the menu (very comprehensive, but all in Spanish), took it to our room, and spent a fun half hour translating it using the BES. We got perhaps 90% of it. The waitress was amused.

My wife would have the BES in hand as we drove along the roads in our rented car, and help me understand the road signs (like Peligro Peatones – I though these might be cows or something like that – my wife quickly found that it meant pedestrians, so I could relax).

A. Strengths:

1. Speed of finding a word. This is most important. One presses the power button, and the LCD screen pops up after 2 sec. One selects English-Spanish (default) or Spanish-English and presses Enter. One types the word into the box. One must press firmly and not too fast – slower than at a PC keyboard – then press enter. Sometimes it goes straight to the dictionary entry, other times it prompts one to select from various forms of the word.

2. Correcting One’s Spelling: A nice feature is that one does not have to spell the word correctly – it will list the closest matches. For example, enter “aq”. It will return alca, aca, acqui, etc. This I found very useful, for example, when one hears a word and is not quite sure how it is spelled.

3. Verbal Pronunciation of most words (not all): I agree with criticisms that the little speaker is not very clear. I tried earphones – not much better. But the nice thing it provides is the accent – so important in Spanish. For example, pago can mean I pay for (present) or he/she paid for (preterite past), depending on the accent. The speaking voice makes this very clear. It also tells one whether the consonant is hard or soft – e.g. C and G. I have since learnt the rules for these – soft if followed by e or i – but the “voice” helped to get there.

4. Usage Examples. Spanish seems to have many special idiomatic usages for certain words, where the word means different things depending on the context . A classic example is “hacer” – to do/make. It can mean to do, or can refer to the weather (hace buen tiempo) or can mean “ago” (hace dos semanas – 2 weeks ago). The BES gives good examples of all of these. So does my NW dict, but the pocket ones don’t.

5. Verb Conjugations. Great feature. Assume one enters hacer in the box (or one of its forms e.g. hice, which will take you to hacer). The infinitive is first listed. Press the “Conj” button. It first gives an “overview” page, based on 1st person (Yo). The list is as follows:
yo hago(today)
I do (today)
yo hare (tomorrow)
I will do (tomorrow)
etc for the other tenses. (Press pg down to scroll). If one presses “Conj” again, one gets the detailed conjugation, which I found very useful. This includes all 6 forms (I, you (tu), he/she/it, we, you (vosotros), they), for 20 different tenses – imagine! It takes a while to move down through each tense to find the one you want, but it seems to be all there (although my studies suggest that few people learn 20 unique tenses for hacer). The nice thing is that each form has the English translation. Until I got the BES I struggled with the difference between “preterite” and “imperfect”. I first bought a paperback – “The Everything Spanish Verb Book” by Lawless, which is a handy reference for advanced users but lacks the English translations of the tenses. The BES has them all.

6. Ability to jump to any Word in a Sentence, and Look it up. Another very useful feature, which took me several months to discover. Here is an example. Suppose one looks up “navaja” (pocket knife – I looked this up in order to ask for one in the market in Granada. Success - only $3!). The BES has 2 entries – one is “pocket knife”. The other is “navaja de afeitar” (razor). Assume one wants to know the exact meaning of “Afeitar” – looking up ancillary words is often fun to do, since Spanish is a fascinating language. One can press the clear button, type in the word (if one can remember its spelling) and find its dictionary entry. Rather tedious, as one has then lost one’s original word (navaja). Same problem with a dictionary, unless one has lots of yellow post-Its. The BES solves this problem with a cool feature, which is buried in the instructions. (“When all else fails read the instructions..). With the results for “navaja” displayed, press the Enter key. The cursor appears (black) . Press the navigation keys and the cursor jumps around to each word on the page. Highlight the word “Afeitar” and press enter. It takes one straight to the dictionary entry for Afeitar (to shave). One can conjugate this if one wishes. Then, one simply presses the Back button one or more times to return to the navaja entry. This is one of the truly “fun” features of the BES – one can start with a word, like in scrabble, and navigate all over the place. Another plus – in the Navaja entry, for example, one can also highlight some English words (not all) and jump to it (in the English dictionary) for its meaning. For example, one can highlight “razor” and press enter. One then learns that this is called a “rastrillo” in Mexico, and that a shaver is an afeitadora. Great fun!

7. Temporary Word Storage. This helps one learn. For example, with the navaja entry displayed, one presses the “List” button. It prompts one to add “navaja” to the ‘Spanish” list. It then returns to the navaja entry. If one highlights razor and presses List, it will prompt one to add it to the English list. There are 2 limitations to this. One is that the total words (Eng + Span combined) is 40 – not very much. Also, if the battery goes, you lose it. See my note about battery usage below.

8. English Dictionary. This is to find out what English words mean (no Spanish). This is unexpected bonus. When reading English books, many of us like to improve our English vocabulary. But it gets tedious flipping though a large dictionary. The BES makes this fun. Example. I love Antonia Fraser’s books on English history. But she loses me sometimes. I came across the word “eponymous”. What does this mean? The BES told me in about 5 seconds, and gave me usage examples, which were better than in my Concise Oxford. Another example. In Nica, my wife and I were trying to remember the word for the "Study of Word meanings". I thought it was Entymology. My Wife felt that was the study of insects. So I looked it up in the BES. It said the correct spelling was “Entomology” (sure, you readers all knew that!) and it means the Study of Insects. But I was sure there was a similar word for the study of words. So I pressed back on the BES and deleted the “n” (to leave “Etomology"). Success! It returned the correct spelling, “Etymology”, which means the History of the Linguistic Form (or words). There are some words which it doesn’t know – e.g. “recusant”, the word used by Antonia for Catholics in 17th Century England who refused to worship at the Church of England. But then my Concise Oxford didn’t have it either. If any of you like to do the Reader’s Digest’s “It pays to Improve your word power” – the BES is great for this.

9. Useful Phrases (Eng and Spanish). It has these in categories, like animals, money, dating. Rather like the canned phrases in the Lonely Planet Latin American Spanish Guidebook, although not as comprehensive. Useful, nevertheless.

10. Grammar lessons – these describe the tenses and help one learn the difference between say, the Gerund and the Past Participle. However, to do this subject justice, a much better idea is to study Richmond’s book (see title above). I took this along with me to Nica and would study it at the hotels.

11. Battery Usage: The BES takes 2 AAA batteries. I installed 2 new alkalines four months ago. After 3 months of daily use, sometimes for 30 minutes at a time, they are still OK. I removed them today and checked their voltage (I know, that is a typically nerdish thing for an engineer to do) – both were 1.41 V. New Alkalines from the same batch are 1.60-1.61 V. I would guess that these are about 50-60% used up – depends on how low the voltage can go on the BES, which I have not tested. This is better than I expected. One reason is the auto-shutoff feature, which is also a complaint. (See below). There is a 9V external power jack if one wants to save AAA batteries.

B. Weaknesses

1. Auto Shutoff. This can be set at 1, 2, or 5 minutes. I set it at 5, since the battery usage is low even at this setting. The reason is that if you are looking up a word, and you wish to keep it displayed while you do something else (e.g. go back to you study materials), it may shut off. When powered on again, it forgets where it was and one has the enter the word again. This is Ok for a simple word entry, but what if you are viewing the 10th tense of a verb? It takes a while to get back to there.

2. No easy Way to Jump Ahead in verb Conjugations. For example, assume that you wish to view all the imperative forms of Hacer (typically, there are two useful ones - the formal (ud) and the informal (tu), which differ). These are listed in the 18th tense of the conjugations (second from last tense). It seems one has to scroll through the first 17 tenses to get to it. Rather tedious. (The overview page doesn’t list the imperative). Cap and FN buttons can be used to jump one display within or to the end of a tense. I could not find a way to skip tenses. I nice feature would be a list of tenses, from which one could choose which one to jump to.

3. Italics are repeated. Another reader listed this as the chief reason why he gave the BES only a 1/5. I agree it is a bug, but it has not bothered me. I have encountered it perhaps 5 or 6 times in perhaps 1000 word lookups. When it does occur, it is usually obvious what it intended. For example. Let’s use Hacer again. One of the entries is “(referring to referring to weather)”. It is usually easy to understand what is meant, especially when one realizes that there is a bug.

4. Verb Tense Navigation is Slow. For example, consider Hacer again. Assume one is at the first tense (the Overview). To get to the Imperative takes over 40 seconds (18 presses of the Conj key). To save time, one can press the key multiple times to “queue” the presses, but don’t go to far! – if you go past it, you can’t step back one tense – pressing the back button takes you to the beginning. Part of the reason for the slow navigation is probably the low- powered cpu used. A faster cpu would drain the battery faster. So a compromise is necessary. It would be better to provide an easier way to find the correct verb tense, as mentioned above.

5. Some words seem wrong. We found only a few. Example – drinking straw. The BES says it is pajita, but the locals were adamant it is pajilla. Not sure if this is a local variation.

6. List is limited to 40 words, and is not retentive. 500 words would be nice. Retentiveness would then be essential, so as not to lose the list if one changes batteries.


Other Notes:
1. Display: This is bright enough for me, even when used outside (which I did often when on the streets in Nica). In bright sunlight it can be difficult, but all one needs is to shade it with a hat. There are 3 text sizes – L, M, S. I prefer S, even though I use glasses (I am 58), as it then gives 10 lines per screen, which is nice.

2. Size: 4.5” wide x 5.5” long by 0.5” thick (with a AAA battery housing increasing the width to 0.75” over a 0.5” width behind the display). One needs a large pant pocket, but a jacket often works. Problem is, it is mostly too hot to wear a jacket in C. America. I put it in a small belt pack with my camera (a Canon 760IS), and it was always available. (It is not as useful to have it is a backpack – not very handy).

3. Robustness. I was concerned at first, but have not had problems. The keys have held up well, and I have dropped it a couple of times, without issue. At first, I used a separate plastic cover for the BES, inside my belt pack – but I soon abandoned this – too much hassle.

4. Price. Retail last summer was about $120. I found it for about $88 delivered from Amazon. I would say this is great value, for how much more fun it has made learning Spanish (compared with a paper dictionary). It transformed our trip.