Quote Originally Posted by Marcus View Post
Почему? Они переводить не умеют?
Переводить умею, а как можно иностранцу отличать очень маловероятные словосочетание от тех, что по-настоящему можно встречаться в русской речи?

(I can translate the phrases, but how is a foreigner supposed to distinguish the highly unlikely phrases from those that one might realistically encounter in Russian speech?)

I think Doomer overstated the case -- the list of homonyms isn't "useless" without a translation. But it is perhaps "intimidatingly long", and it includes a lot of examples that one would rather rarely hear in speech and that aren't important for Russian learners, such as Шпик ел шпик ("The spy/detective was eating the chopped lard"???, according to my dictionary.) It would be a more useful list for learners if edited down to exclude low-frequency words.