Pricey, wrong or missing data, but not useless

Ive had this app on my iPhone for over a year and after some initial use I’ve never used it. I had other apps or web sites that do a better job at giving me definitions and verb conjugations. I saw the 1.5 update was available in iTunes so I downloaded it and spent some time trying it out again after months of not realizing I even owned this app.

First, I expect a lot from a $20 iOS app. I was initially disappointed when I looked up several words in Italian and saw they were not in this apps dictionary. Falò (meaning bonfire or campfire) is not in the dictionary. Bonifico is, but the definition given (discount) is pretty close to being wrong (it might be used as a tertiary definition) but it does not include the principle meaning (money transfer). It says vado and vo are both first person singular present tense forms of andare. I have never seen vo listed as a form of andare in any book I have in Italian, nor in any online resource. (However, Im not an expert speaker of Italian, but if it is allowed its very very very rarely used).

I generally use my iPad in portrait mode but this app behaves differently in portrait and landscape mode. I will point out this is not uncommon, but it’s something I have to get use to.

If you ask for an English definition of fu and hit search you get the entry "Kung fu". But before you hit the Search button you will see a strip that says "Matches: fu essere fucilare Did you mean fui?" Okay so if you know fu is a form of essere you hit essere and then double click the conjugation pane to see all the conjugations at once to see that fu is third person singular remote past form of essere. I guess fucilare shows in the list because its the word in their dictionary that falls after fu (??) Anyway, assuming you dont know the word (why are you looking it up?) giving a list of possible words that could relate could put you on a long tedious path to the solution you are looking for. WordReference does a much better job of this.

Too many words have one-word definitions that really dont give one the proper meaning (e.g. allacciarsi == interlock). I suppose limiting definitions is why they can load it on your iOS device.

So, it seems so far I dont like this app very much. Whats good about it? Well in my opinion the number translator is pretty sweet. Type in 512 and it writes the number in Italian "cinquecentododici", of course it will do it in English as well “five hundred (and) twelve”. And you can punch in huge numbers as well (e.g. 1,987,654,321). This is a good way of learning to speak large numbers.

The other positive, if it matters to you, is that this app is on your iOS device. You can use it fully while your iOS device is in Airplane Mode or otherwise not connected to the Internet.

So after studying this app for a few hours today I think I may pull it up sometimes, but it probably won’t be my go to translation app. It does have some potential and I hope the developer keeps improving it. But knowing what I know about this app I would not buy it.

Beeber55 about Ultralingua Italian-English, v1.5