Korean Electronic Dictionary Magic Talker D500

First off, I haven't had this item too long just yet, only a couple of days, so if durability turns out to be an issue, I will have to update the review. Anyway, this is a product aimed primarily at Korean native speakers who want to learn English (or Japanese or Chinese). The menus and the manual are all in Korean. That being said, if you have a fair basic knowledge of Korean, you should be able to figure out how to use it. It really isn't too complicated. The only other downsides I've run into so far are: A- It only runs off of AAA batteries. So investing in rechargeables would probably be a good idea. (It can last for a while on those AAAs though, I used it actively for the better part of a day, looking up some 200-odd words, and only brought the charge down about half-way.) The power-saver features turn off the backlighting after about 5 seconds of inactivity, and turn the power off after about a minute. B- I may have just missed it (I haven't looked too hard just yet), but the included Japanese and Chinese support only seem to go to Korean, not to English. Not a big deal if you only want it for the Korean-English functionality, but I was hoping to get some use out of the Japanese dictionary part too. As for the good points, the dictionary itself is quite inclusive, as well as being fairly intuitive and easy to use. For words that come from Chinese (the majority of them) the Chinese characters(hanja) are included next to the Korean (han'gul). Out of the approximately 200 words I have looked up so far, only a few compounds were missing. (and the meanings could be intuited from the parts, which were present). I should also note that the words I was looking up were from a high level Korean textbook, not introductory level stuff. Also, that was only the "Prime" dictionary. There are multiple dictionaries included. I haven't even touched any of the other ones yet. I have not yet used the audio pronunciation guide either, I may update the review if there is anything particularly bad or good about it. To conclude, unless I run into some major issues, I have to say that this item is excellent for the price.

It does not come with a recharger, so it is inconvenient to change the batteries when they ran out.

I purchased this as a gift and the person who received this loved it, works well as advertised and exactly what others have said in the reviews

I like the part where they read you the words! It is a great buy for the cost.

helps me comunicate

I mistakenly purchased this device for my son, who is an English-speaker learning Korean. This device is really cool (especially for the price!) - lots of options and dictionaries with AUDIO pronunciation of ENGLISH words for Koreans learning English (sounds like an American.) But, it is pretty useless for an English speaker learning Korean.