foreign languages

I had American Heritage dictionary CD and Microsoft Encarta Dictionary. Recently I discovered this and found it far superior to earlier mentioned products.
Almost every word contains usage examples and I found it extremely useful.
I feel unlucky for not being able find this earlier.
I would absolutely recommend this to anyone.
Excellent product for the price.
Kudos to whoever created this product.

I consider the CD-Rom you get with the book the best dictionary on the market. Each entry has IPA symbols and also a red loudspeaker icon for the British pronunciation and a blue one for the American. A microphone icon lets you practise your pronunciation.
The feature I like using every day is the QUICKfind with the automatic sound. You just point the mouse at a Word document or at the text on a web page and the software speaks up the sound for you. While listening to the sound, the QUICKfind let you have a small dictionary window open on the screen with the meaning of each word you are pointing the mouse at, and the two loudspeakers with both English and American pronunciations are still there. Just imagine all those foreign languages and literatures university students who are going to prepare for their oral exams and have to be able to read aloud loads of poems with a perfect pronunciation and also explain the words' meanings - what a lot of time saved with the aid of this software!
The main window has three other useful icons, i.e. Exercises, Pictures and Study pages.
Among the Exercises, you can find Word Exercises (adjectives and adverbs, affixes, homophones, irregular and problem verbs, noun forms, suffixes, verbs meaning 'perform') and Pictures Exercises (animals, back, birds, body, car exterior, car interior, cars and trucks, clothes, flowers, foot, fruit, hair, hand, hats, head, in the kitchen, in the office, kitchen equipment, office equipment, phrasal verbs, planes, ships and boats, skeleton, sports, vegetables).
Among the Pictures you can find about 100 tables of content with colourful drawings. If you point the mouse at a drawing, its word appears, whereas if you click on the drawing, its meaning appears.
Among the Study pages you can find very useful documents in PDF format, divided into two categories, i.e. "Vocabulary, Grammar, Pronunciation" (a guide to pronunciation, determiners, homographs, homophones, irregular verbs, modal verbs, phrasal verbs, prefixes and suffixes, punctuation, regular inflections, regular verb tenses, relative clauses, word building) and "General Information" (common names, common symbols, computers, geographical names, letter writing, measurements and quantities, money, periods of time, relationships, sounds and smells, telephoning, varieties of English, work and jobs).
I would give this item six stars, if only I could! Highly recommended to all those who need a very fast desktop companion, for it's a real pleasure to work with, and once the software is saved into your hard disk, you won't need to run the CD any more.

To catch a real pronunciation of words, I often use Collins Cobuild English Dictionary CD-ROM, Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary CD-ROM, and occasionally Merriam-Webster's free on-line dictionary .... In most cases, the pronunciation of Merriam-Webster is most euphonic. And from a comparison with Cambridge Dictionary CD-ROM, it can be roughly infered that Merriam-Webster has an Briticism, and the tones in Collins Cobuild CD-ROM tend to be American (but seem a bit monotonous).

However, Collins Cobuild CD-ROM supplements a shortage of Cambridge Dictionary CD-ROM in thesaurus part (Cambridge Dictionary CD-ROM offers only related words, not synonyms). Furthermore, Collins Cobuild CD-ROM offers a lot of real sentences and examples to help reader define a word more accurately. This is exactly why I choose Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners rather than a reputed Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary or Random House Webster's College Dictionary. By the way, both Webster's Unabridged Dictionaries have CD-ROM versions. If any opportunity, I'd like to try to explore any one of them.