French English Dictionary A-1 Vol. 1

OK, not really overnight, but this dictionary was recommended to me by a prof in college and I bought it before spending a year in Paris. Mind you I went to Paris with close to zero conversational experience, though I'd started to read a bit. And I wasn't even there to study the language. But because I lived with this dictionary day and night, my new French friends--made two+ months later--insisted on calling me "fluent" (not all Parisians are nasty) and I used it to read many, many, many books when I was there. Harrap's will save your life; I don't usually feel so attached to reference materials.Definitions are lengthier than other dicitonaries I've seen, and there are sentence examples and word combinations included. If you want to avoid wasting money on dictionaries that only kind of help you translate/understand because they only give you a one- or two-word English equivalent, and you want to be able to dig deeply into a text, buy this one.