摘要：Although it is often considered that successful use of a dictionary does not require any special knowledge or skills, research has shown that most users do not consult dictionaries efficiently or frequently enough. Users often avoid consulting dictionaries as much as they can, because they consider it to be a tedious and uninteresting task. Even when they consult a dictionary, most of them are not familiar with types of dictionaries, what type of dictionary would be the most useful one or how to assess the quality of a dictionary. A lot of information in a dictionary remains unnoticed and/or users fail to interpret it. These statements hold true for most users and for students of humanities or linguistics. Just like other users, students of linguistics fail to notice their own lack of user competence and are often unwilling to invest some time and effort to improve it. They may be willing to change this attitude only after being persuaded through a series of obvious examples that they fail to notice a lot of useful information that would allow them to avoid certain mistakes or to solve a problem.
