| Book of the Month | ||
|
Collins Cobuild English Usage | |
ISBN 0-00-716346-0
This is the one of the latest Collins Cobuild books. Like all new books in this series it has a pretty sunrise on the cover. This is the only picture you will find in hundreds of pages of densely-packed English, apart from little black and white US flags showing where the English being described is an American usage. At over 3cm thick and 3/4 of a kilogram in weight, this is a brick of a book. Collins will tell you it is actually three books in the same cover - a book on English usage, a slightly thinner book of English grammar, and another book called 'topics' which is mainly function-based.
This is a reference book. There are no exercises, and it would be painful to read through it from page one to page 800. The Usage section, which is the biggest part of the book, takes common words and shows you how they are used. It will give you the plural if it is irregular, and some example sentences. We looked up 'penny' and were given a brief description of what a penny is, and some example sentences. But though the book claims to describe idioms, we did not find the expressions 'a bad penny' or 'the penny drops'.
The grammar part of the book gives short explanations of all the relevant parts of English grammar, though it has the strange habit of referring to uncountable nouns as 'uncount' nouns and countable nouns as 'count' nouns. The 'Topics' section is well worth reading. It gives descriptions of things like 'reactions' - what to say when you are surprised, bored and so on, how to use numbers and fractions, word usage on the telephone, and so on.
The free CD was excellent. It can be run from the disk without any installation, and ran with no problems on all the computers we tried. It makes no attempt to be a multi-media experience, which makes it compatible with most computers. Nevertheless, it would have been good to find some examples of pronunciation, sentence rhythm or stress. In fact this CD contains the grammar section, which is well laid out, and easy to use. If you just want to use the grammar section; use a notebook computer and the CD. (A modern notebook computer is probably lighter than the book anyway!)
Who is this book for? This is something the book itself cannot decide. It is not a dictionary, nor a linguistics book. Because it tries to do so many things it ends up doing many of them not very well. It might best be described as a Parson's egg (something else not mentioned in the book, but which is an idiom for something that is good, but only in places). The best use for this book is as a reference if you are reading and find a word you do not understand, or do not understand how the word is being used. And the CD on your computer is a very useful grammar guide.
Verdict: Too big to be a handy reference, too small to be a complete one.
Assessment 5/10
This review copy was supplied by Cambridge International Book Centre