Essential Books for Foreign Language Study

[letutor]

No I only speak French as a second language.

[tamsin23]

Holy crap. Do you speak all eight languages listed after "tags"? If you do, how young were you when you started?

[penpan]

Thanks for your tips and language book selections. Very informative.

[letutor]

You definitely give up some extra features with the tiny pocket dictionaries but they are extremely convenient. The other small problem is they are probably not for beginners because they are not in English.

However, you can find slightly larger ones that are bilingual.

[hobielover]

I have the exact same Spanish verb book! Great book. I prefer the VOX dictionary for Spanish, though, and I'm not quite sure what's the best for Chinese. I have one of the itty-bitty dictionaries for Chinese, but it doesn't have the radical index, which is a big down-side. (So, I have to know the pronunciation in order to find the character, but there's no way to do that with that dictionary alone, unless I recognize a phonetic component in the character itself.)