Dear Professor,

The hot stuff arouses my desire to possess it at the earliest opportunity. I can predict that it will not be long before I can lay my hands on it on the Internet for free. Do I sound like a thief? Shengliver would not do such a low thing, but tech has made Shengliver ‘a millionaire’, if not “a billionaire”, in terms of English language resources.

The front cover and the back cover of OALD 9 are enticing. It seems that the dic has included some interactive features like iSpeak and iWrite. Hopefully, it will beat the dumb 8th edition. Right now, I still love the 7th edition very much. The original software of the 7th edition was clumsily programmed by Oxford, but I got a hacker’s patch on the Web, which, like a magic wand, renders the 7th edition app very handy indeed.

When I was a high school senior in 1988, one of my classmates had got a bilingual dictionary, a pirated edition of course, whose editor was a Taiwanese. The name seems to have been Xu Qingdi. At that time I could not have loved it more. I often borrowed it from that girl classmate. Sometimes the girl joked that she should give the book to me as a present because its owner seemed to use less of it.

The first time I heard of OALD was in the autumn of 1989, when I got enrolled at Yunyang Teachers College in Danjiangkou. One of my teachers introduced it to us, when he found that each of us was handed two dictionaries from the school textbook department. One was the New Chinese-English Dictionary; the other an Oxford for beginners. It turned out that the librarian had made a stupid mistake when he was ordering course books and study materials for our grade. Instead of supplying OALD, he equipped us with an Oxford for beginners. We were English language majors.

In the autumn of 1990, I ventured to the library office, where I got a copy of OALD at my own expense. It was still a pirate edition, the original one done by a Hong Kong press. It was a bilingual edition, with the Chinese translations in traditional characters. I was the only one in my class who was willing to shell out approximately 10 RMB yuan for the dic. The free monthly board provided by the state to us teachers-to-be was less than 30 yuan. All the English language majors of Grade 90 had this version of Oxford.

This pirate OALD helped me a great deal when I was laying my English language foundations in the remaining two terms of my college years. I got to know that OALD was the first ever learner dictionary where each verb falls into a usage category brainchilded by its pioneering editor, A S Hornby. Each category corresponds to a label, like VN. This feature was of immense assistance, for then I had great difficulty telling which structure follows a particular verb. Is it doing, to do, sb to do, that-clause etc.? The labels show it as clearly as a formula does a maths concept. Some years ago, one of my pupils had a version of OALD with your name printed in the preface or somewhere. But I have forgotten the exact edition of it.

After I became a teacher of English, in the 1990s I bought a Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) at a bookshop in the city. It was the first official edition found in mainland China, co-published by Longman and FLTRP. At the time, Shiyan City and Yunyang Prefecture were still two separate geopolitical entities under the provincial government. The dic was a monolingual edition. I benefited a lot from its defining vocabulary of 3,000 English words. All definitions were written with the most commonly used lexicon of the English language.

This feature facilitates an intermediate-level learner’s effort to think in English in the right way and eventually builds up this critical learning habit. Once used to it, he will depend less on the mother tongue and more on the target language in the accumulating process. It will be snowballing his knowledge and competence.

I purchased my first PC in 2003 and got wired in 2004. As time went by, it dawned on me that digital technology was to change ways languages are taught and learned. I started to scavenge digital versions of all major English language dictionaries on the Web. Looking back, I have achieved a lot. Besides, as my familiarity with the computer increased, I fell in love with the digital way of doing things. I have written a rather long entry on this topic on my blog titled The Reading Habit. If you like, Professor, you could read it and offer me criticism.

The digital learner’s dic I have found the handiest so far is LDOCE 5. I consult it on my (digital) desktop so many times a day. I was wondering if you had ever used it before, Professor, since you are an inveterate bookworm. So intuitive is the app that its paper sibling looks a bit stupid. Not to mention ease of lookup, all the example sentences are audible, modelled by either British or American speakers. Longman Activator is incorporated in it. Through Activator, I can tell the subtle nuances of meanings of synonyms. Furthermore, it can also help me pinpoint the right word for a concept. Say, if I want to say I had dinner at a very expensive beautifully-decorated restaurant in town last Sunday, is there a more accurate word than expensive for the idea? Longman Activator comes in very handy when there happens such a need. Upon my query, I find a better word than expensive is fancy. There are several other add-on components too, of which I like Vocabulary Trainer best. Of course, you could also do dictation practice in the dic. Dictation is just one of the 8 categories of rich interactive practice available in the Exercises feature. In a word, the LDOCE 5 software goes way beyond a conventional lexicon.

My general impression is that Longman has surpassed Oxford, Cambridge and other British and American publishers in delivering user-friendly ELL and ELT materials. I suspect that the latest OALD is another attempt from Oxford to emulate LDOCE in some ways. I am curious about its speaking functionality, though.

Hopefully I will acquire a digital edition of OALD 9 and investigate it personally someday. I will not revise my blog entry Guide to a Linguistic PC this time for its sake. As I revealed in one of our exchanges, all the items listed in the entry are digital assets on Shengliver’s PC desktop.

Another issue I’d eagerly hear your word on is what Patrick Chin and I have been talking over in our past few email conversations. I learned from him about his family’s tragedy, which befell the Chins in the 1940s. When his father, Professor Chin, was still a college student in Wuhan, some local activists in Yunyang shot dead Patrick’s granddad and a couple of his uncles. I was shocked when I heard it from Patrick. I hope to ask Mr Leng about it on my next visit. Should you know anything in this regard, please make me wiser, Professor.

Some good news on my side: My winter holidays start on Monday evening February 9. I will have about 18 days off for the grandest Chinese festival. My students will come back for the new term on the eighth day of the first lunar month 2015. I bet you are looking forward to meeting your children and grandchildren right now.

Yours

Shengliver