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I am looking for a French dictionary for beginners like myself.

Ideally, such a dictionary would be:
1. A site or an app (not necessarily free)
2. Contains simple examples of each usage of a word
3. The dictionary can be French Portuguese or French English or even pure French if it is basic enough

If no such this dictionary is available in digital form it would be ok also to have a widely available book form dictionary

Thanks

Is has been indicated to me that another question might be useful: Resources to verify French words, expressions, usage, grammar

Indeed, it has some good answers (most on the question text itself), but its focus is more broad. I want to know specifically about begginer resources.

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My preferred online dictionary for French is Word Reference (http://www.wordreference.com/). It has English to French translations as well as French to English translations. It doesn't have Portuguese-French, but it does have Portuguese-English, so you might be able to translate a word into English and then French if Portuguese is your native language.

Doing a brief Google search gave me Ultralingua, Babylon and Reverso - you can choose to translate between any two languages you want here (I would post these links but stackexchange says I haven't got enough reputation). It should be easy enough to Google these two.

My personal favourite for looking up words in context is Linguee (http://www.linguee.com/english-french/?moreLanguages=1#moreLanguages) which allows you to look up words used in context in one language (includes English, French and Portuguese) and see the direction translation of the word in context in the other language. This site uses content from multilingual websites that have the same content translated into different languages.

Hope this helps!

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  • Linguee proved particularly useful. And it is free. And iyou can download dictionaries for offline use. Very nice! Thanks
    – josinalvo
    Commented Mar 15, 2017 at 21:54
  • @josinalvo Linguee is not a dictionary but a corpus, some of the translations are not good, I'd say the same with Reverso Context. But I strongly recommend Reverso dictionary, it is far better than wordreference.
    – None
    Commented Mar 20, 2017 at 18:42
  • @Laure To each their own, I'd say. If I'm looking up a word, I'd use a French-English dictionary, but if I'm not sure of how a word would be used in context, I use Linguee. I don't go with the first result I see, of course, but Linguee gives me the word in multiple contexts, which gives me a better sense of how the word would be used when an ordinary dictionary wouldn't be as thorough. Could you give me an example of how the translations on Linguee are "not good", as you say?
    – tamayura
    Commented Mar 20, 2017 at 19:52

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