The word "dilettante" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to someone who is interested in something, but has a superficial understanding of it or lacks experience in it. For example, "My friend is a dilettante when it comes to art - he knows a little bit about it, but knows nothing of the history behind the pieces."
These years were dilettante in comparison with the body of work that followed, but they provided a bedrock of experience that was compounded by technical experience gained in television, first as part of the famous BBC Tonight programme, under Donald Baverstock, then Alastair Milne.
Much of Ms Trott's personal blog, VoxTrott, is devoted to images of her beloved dog Maddy, while Mr Trott, a dilettante cook, likes to post "disgusting pictures of good food" on his blog.
Is organic farming just a sport for dilettante hobbyists, or could it have a significant role in the future of agriculture?Sales of organically produced food, though small, have been growing fast over the past decade (in America, by 20% a year; in some European countries by as much as 40% a year).
While HP has dismissed Mr Hewlett as a dilettante academic and musician, he has said the company needs a boss who is not learning on the job.Mr Hewlett does, however, have some strong evidence on his side.
Even his fans acknowledge that he bought titles such as the Revue des Deux Mondes, which was founded in 1829, simply for the prestige.It would be a mistake, however, to see Mr Lacharrière as a dilettante.
It also hurt that he was seen as a dilettante, born to wealth and privilege and thus insensitive to the concerns of ordinary voters.
This is not the work of a dilettante, but a strong follow-up to her acclaimed short stories that came out in 2007.
Mr Ganley is a puzzling figure: neither a scary demagogue, nor a millionaire dilettante, but with elements of both those ills.A lot of his hardcore supporters on the trail are conservative Catholics, who volunteer that their top issue is abortion.
Along the hundreds of miles of its coral expanse, even a dilettante diver with but a day to spend recently encountered reef sharks, schools of barracuda, friendly giant cod, turtles, manta rays, strange jellyfish (some deadly) and myriads of smaller iridescent fish of many different kinds.
His tone, usually that of an observant and somewhat sensual dilettante, sometimes slips into heavy-handed irony.
Its sister, by contrast, is loose-limbed, sprawling and a bit of a dilettante, worrying about greenery, equality and empowerment, as well as poverty.Inevitably, they squabble.
