Some American trees: An intimate study of native Ohio trees

Average customer rating:

very handy

Quite useful

Worth the Price

Outstanding!

A great (and very portable) aid to Mexican Spanish

The Rough Guide to Mexican Spanish Dictionary Phrasebook 2: Dictionary Phrasebook (Rough Guide Phrasebooks)
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Manufacturer: Rough Guides
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The People's Guide to Mexico (Peoples Guide to Mexico)

Mexican Spanish: Lonely Planet Phrasebook

Easy Spanish Phrase Book: Over 770 Basic Phrases for Everyday Use (Dover Easy Phrase)

The Plain Truth about Living in Mexico: The Expatriate's Guide to Moving, Retiring, or just hanging out

Cashing In on a Second Home in Mexico: How to Buy, Rent and Profit from Property South of the Border

ASIN: 1858286093

Customer Reviews:

very handy.......2004-12-25

I consider myself beginner in spanish. The only sentence that I can confidently say is "Habla usted ingles?". I took this book and Oxford spanish dictionary to my eight day trip to Guadalajara, Mexico. This book became so handy that I left the Oxford dictionary in my hotel room.

Besides words and phases, it provide menu reader and other very useful information about Mexico. i.e. Under a word "phone", it describes how to use public phone in Mexico. I didn't realize most public phones only accept phone card and only the phone card from their company. I suggest buying Telmax phone card, since you can only find Telmax public phones.

This book is well worth the price.

Quite useful.......2004-11-18

The first time I went to Mexico I tried my Galician on the people and I did not get anywhere. They simply could not understand me. Recently I have been back and took this guide with me. It made a lot of difference. I managed to communicate and the Mexican people I talked to looked happy I spoke their language instead of trying to impose the language of Spain on them.

This guide covers all the expected areas, like food, shopping, accommodation, etc. It is very good, but more phrases would be even more helpful. Then you could use the vocabulary lists in more combinations and enlarge what you can say. Perhaps there will be an extended edition with more of it. I will buy it too!

Worth the Price.......2004-09-07

Though I would not suggust a nonspaniish speaker to enter Mexico with only this limited dictionary, it is a great suppliment. It has very useful words that are common in Mexico plus some great slang. It also has little bits of info next to certain words to aid in its correct usage. I spent an extensive amount of time in Mexico and got this little book's worth many times over.

Outstanding!.......2000-06-26

I bought this book in conjunction with Barron's Law Enforcement Spanish kit. "Mexican Spanish - The Rough Guide" is an outstanding pocket reference! I learned to conjugate verbs very easily given the simple description in the Rough Guide. I particularly like the contextual listings for words in the dictionary section. Very useful! I have several other Spanish books and dictionaries, and they are gathering dust now. I highly recommend this book.

A great (and very portable) aid to Mexican Spanish.......2000-01-21

On my first extensive trip through Mexico, I found this book (along with "The People's Guide to Mexico") to be far more useful than any regular Spanish (meaning, almost always, Castillian) dictionary. In fact, I found it to be much more relevant than the Rough Guide to Mexico! My only regret is that the book isn't longer. It's actually a lot of fun to read. I especially appreciated that it includes many conversational phrases, not just single words. Considering that like English, Spanish isn't particularly literal as spoken actually spoken, books like this are a must for those of us still learning that beautiful language. More to the point, guides to Mexican Spanish are in unduly short supply. This one's a boon and a bargain.

The Rough Guide to Mexican Spanish Dictionary Phrasebook 3 (Rough Guide Phrasebooks)

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The Rough Guide to Mexican Spanish Dictionary Phrasebook 3 (Rough Guide Phrasebooks)
Rough Guides
Manufacturer: Rough Guides
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1843536366

The Rough Guide to Spanish Dictionary Phrasebook 3 (Rough Guide Phrasebooks)

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The Rough Guide to Spanish Dictionary Phrasebook 3 (Rough Guide Phrasebooks)
Rough Guides
Manufacturer: Rough Guides
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1843536285

Book Description

The Rough Guide phrasebook will help you to make friends with the local people, and speaking Spanish as soon as you arrive. This fully-revised third edition includes 16-pages of additional scenario material, from asking for directions and ordering a glass of wine to checking bus times and enquiring about hotel rates. Recorded by native Spanish speakers, the scenarios are available as downloadable audio files either to your computer or iPod Â- ideal for practicing your pronunciation. With A-Z English to Spanish and A-Z Spanish to English translations, this pocket-sized phrasebook is like taking along your own personal translator!

The Rough Guide to Latin American Spanish Dictionary Phrasebook 1 (Rough Guide Phrasebooks)

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The Rough Guide to Latin American Spanish Dictionary Phrasebook 1 (Rough Guide Phrasebooks)
Rough Guides
Manufacturer: Rough Guides
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1843536447

Spanish a Rough Guide Dictionary Phrasebook

Average customer rating:

Almost useless
European vs. Latin American Spanish
Dictionary-In-A-Blender
A very well-thought out book.

Spanish a Rough Guide Dictionary Phrasebook
Lexus
Manufacturer: Rough Guides
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1858285771

Customer Reviews:

Almost useless.......2006-03-20

I took this Rough Guide Spanish Dictionary Phrasebook with me on a recent two-week trip to Spain. I quit referring to it early in the trip, since it rarely had the words and phrases that I needed. It is essentially a concise dictionary containing only the most commonly used words, most of which will already be known by anyone who has had a year of college Spanish. The book includes some phrases, but they are categorized alphebetically in the dictionary rather than being grouped by frequently-encountered situations (hotel, restaurant, store, automobile, etc.), which would be more useful. The menu decoder section had the words I needed only about 2/3rds of the time, and many of them were in my regular pocket dictionary, anyway.

Perhaps the best use of this book is for a quick overview of key vocabulary for tourism by someone who has studied Spanish but who has not used it for awhile. The word pronunciation keys are potentially helpful, especially if you want to speak "high" Castellian Spanish rather than southern or Andelucian Spanish, which is more similar to Mexican Spanish. (For example, la cerveza [beer] is pronounced "thairbaytha.") My trip was limited to Andalucia, where I had no trouble being understood with my mostly Mexican-style pronunciations.

While I was in Spain I used my Webster's New World Pocket Spanish Dictionary constantly, and found it to be extremely helpful as well as convenient. It is a true pocket-sized dictionary with almost all of the words that I wanted (and all that I really needed) in a clear and concise format, and it includes conjugation models for irregular verbs.

European vs. Latin American Spanish.......2004-10-21

Several people have warned me that European and American Spanish are very different, as different as Oxford English and American English. I am a college graduate and I think I am very fluent in American English, but I have a little trouble understanding Tony Blair or Prince Charles when they are speaking to a British audience. I know I'm getting most of the main ideas, but I never know if I'm missing some inportant nuances, and the unusual (to me)accent is very distracting.

I have compared a few of the pronunciations and definitions in the Rough Guide with guides to Latin American Spanish, and there seem to be a lot of significant differences. I showed the Rough Guide to a co-worker from Mexico, and she said it was noticably different from the Spanish she is used to. I need to learn Mexican Spanish.

Dictionary-In-A-Blender.......2002-02-07

The Rough Guide Dictionary Phrasebook ended up at the bottom of my travel bag on my recent trip to Spain. Unlike the usually outstanding country and city guides by the same publisher, this book is a real clunker and seems to be the sad result of putting a dictionary and a few travel magazine articles through a meat grinder.

Mostly the book is a dictionary. But wildly clashing graphics, typefaces, colors, text boxes compete for visual attention, forcing the reader to wade through an awful mess to find the desired word. Green text, bold typefaces, and color-highlighted text boxes containing little travel articles and dialogs might be useful tools in a language textbook or a travel magazine, but they certainly do not make a dictionary very easy to use. A dictionary should help you get right to the word you want, then give your eyes a restful way to read the definition and perhaps the pronunciation guide and other information.

Main word entries are given in exceedingly thin letters which are harder-to-see than the thick, bold green text containing information about word-gender, pronunciation and so on. Better to bold the main words (or if using a color, color only the main word and nothing else on the page) so they stand out on the page, easy to find. Bad typefaces make this book really hard to use.

Worse are the little text boxes on every other page or so, for example after the word "hotel" you'll find a few paragraphs about the different types of accommodation in Spain. So if you're looking up "hour", you won't find it just below "hotel", instead, you'll have to scan column after column, flipping to the second column of the next page, where "hour" is wedged in between yet more extraneous dialog boxes. I found this type of interruption very distracting when trying to look up a word for its Spanish equivalent, so I gave up and bought another dictionary when I was in Spain. Good phrasebooks are already published elsewhere, and so are good dictionaries. Rough Guides should stick to what they do best, namely travel guides, and leave language lessons and dictionaries to the pros.

A very well-thought out book........2001-05-07

On a recent trip to Spain, my travelling companion had this book; I had a different one, and spent much of the trip trying to buy another copy of this one.

It's a very nicely laid-out book. The dictionary lay-out (it's arranged like a spanish-english/english-spanish dictionary, with useful phrases being listed along with the main word in the phrase), rather than a more tradiional phrase-book layout, made it very easy to find what was needed `on the fly'. The choice of words and phrases in the book was excellent for a traveller; by being careful in what was included, the authors managed to make a pretty complete book thats easily small enough to fit in a pocket. The introductory sections on the basics of the language were very useful; the menu reader in the back was great.

Customer Reviews:

Well...the idea was a good one..........2000-04-18

While the idea of trying to compress seven languages into a pocket-sized compendium is an admirable goal, the sheer complexity of the task makes it nearly impossible. And Rough Guide have proven that with this phrasebook/dictionary. They succeeded somewhat with the dictionary but have failed miserably with the phrasebook. Actually, the phrasebook doesn't exist. Well, at least, I still haven't found it. There are a few phrases interpersed in each of the sections, but not enough to cover even the most elementary of circumstances. Luckily, the number of people who speak English in Europe is quite large and expanding all the time. As a matter of fact you would be hard pressed to find a region of western europe where none of the locals can speak english. Unless it's france, where, if you're American they won't speak to you anyway. But in the book's defense: it IS pocket-sized and you can't beat the price. Rough Guide makes many good individual language phrasebooks and I would recommend one of those. But as for this book--emergency only!

Complete, in a small package.......2000-03-27

I purchased this book after looking at several phrase, and travel language books. If you are travelling through several countries, especially by backpack or cycle, it's the only way to go. It has the most complete and useful entries that I have seen so far - - and all in one book!

The Rough Guide to Portuguese 2: Dictionary Phrasebook (Rough Guide Phrasebooks)

Average customer rating:

Big on dictionary, low on phrasebook

The Rough Guide to Portuguese 2: Dictionary Phrasebook (Rough Guide Phrasebooks)
Lexus
Manufacturer: Rough Guides
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Foreign Languages | Reference | Subjects | Books

General | Words & Language | Reference | Subjects | Books

Guidebooks | Reference & Tips | Travel | Subjects | Books

Rough Guide | Guidebook Series | Travel | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1858286441

Customer Reviews:

Big on dictionary, low on phrasebook.......2004-07-19

I'm going to be traveling for Lisbon very briefly and just wanted to have enough Portuguese to get by. This book has just a couple of pages of useful phrases, then it's a thorough dictionary. I would have liked to see more phrases and sentences that are likely for a visitor or tourist to need. I don't want to have to learn to conjugate verbs to say "I'm from Canada".

Book Description

Located only blocks from Tokyo's glittering Ginza, Tsukiji--the world's largest marketplace for seafood--is a prominent landmark, well known but little understood by most Tokyoites: a supplier for countless fishmongers and sushi chefs, and a popular and fascinating destination for foreign tourists. Early every morning, the worlds of hi-tech and pre-tech trade noisily converge as tens of thousands of tons of seafood from every ocean of the world quickly change hands in Tsukiji's auctions and in the marketplace's hundreds of tiny stalls. In this absorbing firsthand study, Theodore C. Bestor--who has spent a dozen years doing fieldwork at fish markets and fishing ports in Japan, North America, Korea, and Europe--explains the complex social institutions that organize Tsukiji's auctions and the supply lines leading to and from them and illuminates trends of Japan's economic growth, changes in distribution and consumption, and the increasing globalization of the seafood trade. As he brings to life the sights and sounds of the marketplace, he reveals Tsukiji's rich internal culture, its place in Japanese cuisine, and the mercantile traditions that have shaped the marketplace since the early seventeenth century.

Customer Reviews:

Perfect Guide to a Tokyo Vacation.......2006-11-29

A fishing boat leaves from Barnegat Light, New Jersey
headed out for a week or more of long-line fishing for
swordfish, but two days later, it's back at the dock
meeting a refrigerated truck. What happened? Was their
trip cut short by mechanical failure? Bad ice?
No, they caught a giant bluefin tuna as a `bycatch'
and a buyer in Tokyo, notified by radio, sent a truck t
o pick it up and get it on the next plane to Japan.
At the heart of all this remarkable transport is
the soon-to-be closed Tsukiji, a giant market next
to the posh Ginza and tacky Shinbashi neighborhoods
that currently handles ten per cent of the world's
trade in fresh fish.

As a piece of social history, this book would be
fascinating and for the anthropologist concerned
with community and institution, it's a milestone.
But that's not why I am recommonding this book so
highly. I urge you to buy it because it's the key
to a particular kind of travel.

If you are going to Tokyo, there is a guidebook
and a list of recommended sights. You can even go
on a tour and have someone decide what you should
see. Or you can take the time to get familiar with
Tsukiji before you leave. You can spend your mornings
(it opens before dawn and is closed just after noon)
wandering the inner and outer market. You can have
the freshest, cheapest sushi you've ever tasted and
shop for sushi knives and other cutlery. You can
speak not a single word of Japanese and have the
time of your life.

Better yet, if you do this, it will change the way
you travel forever. You will no longer be content
to see what you've imagined seeing and what all your
friends have seen. In fact, the whole idea of `seeing'
a city will change. You'll want to taste it, hear it,
smell it and wake up with it too.

This splendid book is nicely written, Bestor has a good
touch with words, a quality not common among
anthropologists. There is also a visitors' guide to
the outer market. So whether your traveliing is ocean-spanning
or armchair-sprawling, Tsukiji is a delight.

--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and the forthcoming novel bang-BANG from Kunati Books. ISBN 9781601640005

This book is not just about fish.......2006-11-22

"If a maritime species can be consumed by human beings, in Japan, it almost certainly has been," writes Harvard anthropologist and sushi aficionado Theodore Bestor.
And the place to get it is Tsukiji at the mouth of the Sumida River in Tokyo, the world's biggest fish market, where millions of pounds of fish a day and billions of dollars worth of seafood a year are received, sold (usually more than once) and shipped. That's about five times bigger than New York's (lately extinct) Fulton Fish Market.
Although Tsukiji controls only a tenth of Japan's seafood business, the Japanese are so devoted to seafood and have so much money that fisheries around the world operate on Tsukiji's beat.
New fisheries have been created just for Tsukiji, like the air-flown fresh Atlantic bluefin tuna business. Tuna is king at Tsukiji, to the point that conservationists fear the extinction of the Atlantic bluefin.
Bestor's "Tsukiji" is comprehensive, neatly fitting the market into both historical and present-day contexts, but his main interest is in what he calls intermediate wholesalers.
There are about 1,600 of them, narrowly specialized. They are proud of their alleged origin as supporters of the first ruling Shogun in Edo (now Tokyo), of their knowledge of fish (but, of course, the younger generation doesn't know what the old-timers think they should), of their hometowns, their high schools, their religious sodalities, family ties, festivals and staying power.
Staying power especially. Some dealers claim to be of the 17th generation. Tsukiji was the famous fish market of Nihonbashi until the Great Kanto earthquake destroyed it in 1923. Rebuilt in a new location, Tsukiji seems to have carried its history along with it successfully.
It is facing an uncertain future again, as usual, says Bestor. The challenges come from the market structure, which is shifting from auctions to direct, negotiated deals. And from the municipal government, which wants to move the cramped, decaying market.
It's within walking distance of Ginza, and many dealers worry that moving away will kill the market. It will almost certainly kill the "outer" market of little stalls and restaurants that congregates around the inner market. (Bestor provides a guide for tourists.)
All markets have, to anthropologists, a certain sameness, but Tsukiji has some uniquely Japanese features. Sakidori is the oddest, compared with American methods.
The auctions begin around 5 a.m., too late for supermarket chains that have to wrestle their purchases through Tokyo's traffic and also need extra time to clean, cut, wrap and price packages. Smaller local shops don't need so much lead time.
Sakidori allows the big guys to carry off whatever they want before the auction, which gives them an advantage in obtaining the best quality items. But the price is set by the smaller guys who stay later.
Another obvious difference between Tsukiji and American markets is the place of religious rites at Tsukiji. Japanese fishmongers may not be any more religious than American businessmen, but they are more likely to organize business matters in religious contexts, from parading at festivals to going as business groups to famous shrines.
Bestor has attempted to write a book for both academic anthropologists and for general readers, and cheerfully invites the general reader to skip some chapters.
It's worth the effort of reading it all. This book is not just about fish.

Detailed book on a fascinating subject.......2006-06-30

I've never seen the Tsukiji fish market in operation, but I'm quite sure that it's fascinating, and one of the best reasons I have for thinking that is this big and detailed book. Theodore Bestor is a professor of anthropology at Harvard, but unlike a stereotypical anthropologist, he doesn't study fossils or primitive tribes. He studies contemporary Japanese economic institutions.

The book is a serious work of academic scholarship but, happily, it's only a little less readable for that. Professor Bestor descends into opaque academic jargon only once and then pretty briefly. (It rather feels as though he does it once just to prove that he can.) Other that that brief bit, there's only a smattering of academic jargon in the book and most of it is perfectly understandable. Professor Bestor is occasionally a bit repetitive, and there are a few inelegant chapter introductions and summaries ("In this chapter I have..."), but there's very little here that hinders an interested lay-person's enjoyment. Besides, who but an academic would spend 15 years visiting and learning about a fish market? Anyone who has an interest in Japanese culture should be glad that Professor Bestor did because there's a lot to learn from reading the book.

Professor Bestor explains the market's history, its seventeenth-century origin in nearby Nihonbashi, its move to Tsukiji in 1923, its move into the current buildings in 1935, its closure during the second world war, its resurgence in the 1950s, and its likely future move to a new location across the Sumida river. In equally careful detail, he tells us about the market's mechanisms and its participants: the auctions and the seven auction-houses, the hundreds of wholesalers and how they do business, how the market changes in anticipation and reaction to consumers' changing preferences, and so on.

There's no question that there are a lot of interesting facts here. I'd never have guessed that sushi as we know it was invented in the middle of the nineteenth century. But, perhaps not surprisingly, Professor Bestor is at his best when he's interpreting and analyzing as an anthropologist. Economic transactions don't happen in a vacuum.

We get a wonderfully clear picture of the numerous overlapping formal and informal relationships among the market's participants and between them and the various parts of local and national government that license and regulate the market. We also get to see wholesalers changing their businesses, not just in response to short-term market changes, but also in response to larger-scale economic trends. While they were once exclusively family businesses, many are now becoming increasingly like ordinary corporations.

Japanese social structures are famously opaque to outsiders and Professor Bestor has done a fabulous job learning about and explaining a fascinating place. And his descriptions are good enough that you can almost smell the fish. There's also a useful guide to to visiting the market at the end of the book.

Hope you're good at skimming..........2005-01-10

A great subject, tackled by a writer who has a nice sense of language -- but please, somebody take a red pen to this book! This isn't a dissertation anymore (I assume it once was -- it certainly reads like one). Every point is belabored. Most of what needs to be cut are repetitive descriptions of the anthropological grounding for his approach to the fish market... but then, there are passages like the one I will take the liberty of quoting below, which truly strain the limits of credulity. Here, from pages 77 and 78 of the hardback version, is an actual description of how to play rock-paper-scissors:

"From time to time, bidders break a tie by a quick round of the child's game of jan-ken (rock-paper-scissors). Two or more people -- on the count of jan, ken, po! -- simulatenously thrust out a hand: a fist to represent a rock, an open palm for paper, or two fingers extended for scissors. Each of the three objects can be defeated by one of the others and can in turn defeat the third: rock smashes scissors (and rock wins); paper covers rock; scissors cut paper. It is a simple mechanism for deciding among ties as long as the group is not too large; this and related hand games are commonplace legacies of Edo's popular culture.

There's the book in a nutshell: the author makes an interesting observation, then beats you over the head with it.

An essential reference for for food lovers going to Tokyo.......2004-10-22

I am not an anthropologist or a foodie who is steeped in the industry. But I did go to Tokyo for 4 days with some friends to find excellent sushi. Having seen Tsukiji in a couple of television specials and worked in a much smaller market in the past I thought it would be interesting to see the real thing. Perhaps I should blame Dr. Bestor for the fact that I ended up spending two half-days engrossed in Tsukiji market but once I read the book and got over the initial shock of the place I felt like I had an inside edge and couldn't pull myself away. The book does an excellent job of balancing personal insights and experiences with objective accounts of the market's history and statistics and provides a behind the scenes understanding of supply and distribution activity as well as the multigenerational, family-run stalls. It's one thing to see the tuna auctions; it's another to have an understanding of how the fish got there, who buys them, how they are sold to the supply and distribution chains, the role of the vendors, the history of the building and other details that give it depth. In the end, after four days of tramping around Tokyo to sample great sushi and other foods, we agreed that the best sushi we had was at a tiny restaurant in the outer market. And my visits to Tsukiji - which is sadly be being replaced by a more modern facility that can better meet the needs of a city that has grown since the facility was built - were the most fascinating part of my visit thanks largely to Dr. Bestor's book.

Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World.(Book Review) : An article from: Pacific Affairs

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Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World.(Book Review) : An article from: Pacific Affairs
Ronald Dore
Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B000ENUNBE
Release Date: 2006-02-18

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Pacific Affairs, published by Thomson Gale on September 22, 2005. The length of the article is 725 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World.(Book Review)
Author: Ronald Dore
Publication: Pacific Affairs (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 78 Issue: 3 Page: 487(2)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

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