On Dictionaries

If you're doing things the way I do things--jumping in utterly unprepared into whatever native materials you can find--then you'll need a good dictionary to start out with.

If you're learning one of the popular languages, like French or Spanish, then limited-vocabulary readers won't be too hard to come by. But they tend to be too boring to bother with anyway. Books written for native speakers are going to draw from an immense range of vocabulary.
For example, I'm currently reading Laura Esquivel's Como Agua Para Chocolate. This is a book that's heavily centered around cooking, food, and the kitchen, so a lot of specialized terminology comes up--and it's terminology that I can't find in my Langenscheidt Standard Spanish Dictionary, which is by no means a bad dictionary. The pocket dictionaries that I had before, before I was fully committed to Spanish, were pretty useless.

So, don't skimp on a dictionary and say that you'll buy a better one later--not if you intend to jump in at the deep end. When in doubt, get a "college" or "unabridged" dictionary; you'll want to spend $30 at least, in general.

Here's a quick trick if you're comparing dictionaries in a bookstore: in one dictionary, flip open to a page and find two words that are ten words apart. Find those words in the other dictionary and count the words between them--in this small sample, does one dictionary have more words than the other? This won't always be useful, because some of those words will be obvious derivatives, but it's a rough guide.

The other thing that you want to look for in a dictionary is cross-references for tenses of verbs. You should have enough imagination and basic knowledge of grammar not to need your hand held for every conjugation, but lots of languages have a few very irregular verbs. My dictionary directs you to "ir" (to go) and "ser" (to be) if you look up "fue," which is the past tense of both. I was very grateful for that when I started out, although thankfully I find myself needing it less these days.