How to use a bilingual dictionary

The most useful book I read before starting graduate school was How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler. Although I'd been a voracious reader since about age 5, "How to Read a Book" taught me the skills to efficiently get the most out of the mountains of reading material that lay before me.

Similarly, using a dictionary involves a number of skills that you might not think about when you just want to look up a word. I've observed that a lot of Kamusi Project users expect the Kamusi to magically read their minds, without pausing to think about what is necessary to get the most out of the dictionary. We try to learn from our users (for example, we developed our parser technology when we realized people were searching for entire conjugated Swahili verbs instead of looking up root forms), but there's a limit to what we can do. We cannot handle misspelled words, for example. And we do not yet have the technology to translate whole sentences.

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