Perhaps the most useful feature of Abbyy Lingvo, however, is that as well as standard look-up by entering search terms, the app allows you to capture text with the phone’s camera and translates it instantly. You can probably imagine just how helpful this is for those moments when you can’t quite face the frantic mental arithmatic of working out the accussative animate adjective ending of, say, душ or душа. But best of all – you can search for a Russian word in any form, and immediately see full grammar tables of all its declensions, conjugations and variations. For any Russian word you look up, you are given examples of how it is used in real sentences in a variety of general translation, explanatory, idiomatic, and specialist subject dictionaries. The result of this is Abbyy Lingvo, doubtlessly one of the best language apps on the market.Ībbyy Lingvo is similar to Google translate, but much more sophisticated. Over the past few years, app-developers have been re-inventing the dictionary to compensate for its inadequacies with complex language. Here, at least, technology is on our side. Truly, we live in an age where to think of an app means one already exists, which is particularly great news for Russian learners. When you have a language with seemingly endless variations of fluid conjugations, declensions, prefixes and suffixes, the translation of any given word is subject to a whole host of semantic nuances which are invariably lost on the the flashing, free translations of Google.Ī good quality dictionary of course gives you reliable definitions, but it can still be almighty confusing if you look up a word in the instrumental plural and want to find its feminine adjective form. If only there was an app which could do this for us…. Taxi driver, can you just pull up near a Starbucks for a second please…?”) and perhaps worst of all – it simply isn’t designed to deal with grammar as complex as Russian. The dependence on wifi means Google has a bad habit of always letting you down when you need it most, (“Sorry Mr. Yes, of course its free and extremely convenient, but there are huge downsides –the inaccuracy, (to my eternal amusement, its unable to distinguish between declensions of the words ‘shower’ and ‘soul’ – душ and душа respectively).

Chances are that, as a language student, you barely go a day without Google translate…

My name is in russian google translate