References

These are the primary references I make use of when I'm reading in a foreign language. I also have a list of foreign novels I have read or am reading.

Spanish

Diccionario de la lengua Española: 23ª Edición (Real Academia Española, 2014) This is the monolingual Spanish dictionary that comes on the Kindle for free. (This is the dictionary people mean when they say "the RAE.") It doesn't have any of the clitic compounds, unfortunately, but it seems to have all the other forms of verbs.

HarperCollins Spanish-English College Dictionary (HarperCollins 2013) Collins did a good job with this bilingual. Not only does it have all the inflected forms, it has all the clitic compounds too. It's not as big as the RAE, but that's its only serious drawback.

A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish: Fifth Edition (Butt and Benjamin, 2011) Most people seem to consider B&B the gold standard in terms of Spanish reference grammar written in English. I have learned an incredible amount from reading it. It is written for the advanced student, though; something like Schaum's may be better suited for those with less linguistic sophistication.

Schaum's Outline of Spanish Grammar: Sixth Edition (Schmidt, 2014) Schaum's outlines are really meant for high school students who have had two years of the language or more and want to prepare themselves for the AP and/or for college placement tests. Their books cover the entire grammar, offer hints for memorizing things like irregular verb forms, and they even include exercises. They don't cover the more exotic details of the languages, though.

El español al día, Book 2: Third Edition Revised (Turk and Allen, 1968). This was my textbook in second-year high school Spanish. I still refer to it for some of its compact verb tables and general rules for irregular verbs.

Italian

"Lo Zigarelli Vocabulario della Lingua Italiana" (Nicola Zingarelli, 2011) This is the monolingual Italian dictionary that comes on the Kindle for free. Someone did an excellent job of including all the forms of Italian verbs, including obsolete ones, although none of the clitic compounds is included.

Collins Unabridged Italian-English Dictionary (HarperCollins, 2012) A pathetic excuse for a dictionary (but there doesn't seem to be a better one); the only reason it works at all is that the Zingarelli is so good. The Collins is missing many inflected forms of verbs--it almost never has the imperfect forms. Even when it does find the word for you, the answer is frequently useless because it puts the pronominals (loosely, the reflexive) forms on separate pages which cannot be accessed easily. To make it work, you use the Zingarelli as your primary dictionary, and when you can't figure things out, you open the Zingarelli as a book and then look up the infinitives. My review of Sostiene Pereire describes how to do this in detail.

A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, Second Edition (Maiden and Robusttelli, 2007) M&R is the gold standard for Italian reference grammars written in English. As with any reference grammar, it assumes the reader is an advanced student of Italian with some linguistic sophistication. Schaum's is a reasonable alternative for those who are less-skilled.

Schaum's Outline of Italian Grammar, Third Edition (Germano and Schmitt, 2009) Schaum's outlines are really meant for high school students who have had two years of the language or more and want to prepare themselves for the AP and/or for college placement tests. Their books cover the entire grammar, offer hints for memorizing things like irregular verb forms, and they even include exercises. They don't cover the more exotic details of the languages, though.

Prego! An introduction to Italian: Fifth Edition (Graziana Lazzarino, 2000) My old Italian textbook from a community-college class I took 15 years ago. I still refer to it from time to time because it has excellent tables and I like the way it organizes topics.

French

Dictionnaire Electronique du Français (Nicolato, 2011) The free monolingual dictionary that comes with a Kindle, it's actually very serviceable. The author seems to have made an effort to use simple words in his definitions, which makes it much easier for a non-native speaker to use than most of the other monolingual dictionaries. I was able to make this my primary dictionary even with the first French novel I ever read, resorting to the Collins bilingual only some of the time.

Collins French to English (One Way) Dictionary & Grammar, 6th revised edition (HarperCollins, 2013) Like all Collins bilingual dictionaries, it has good definitions for a reasonable selection of headwords. Because the built-in monolingual dictionary works so well for French, I haven't really pushed the Collins very hard, but when I couldn't figure out the monolingual, the Collins was always a lifesaver.

Advanced French Grammar (L'Huillier, 1999) Probably the best English-langauge reference grammar for French, although it's rather old compared to what's available for the other languages, and it is only available as a printed book. All reference grammar demand a high level of knowledge of the language as well as linguistic sophistication, but L'Huillier is more demanding than most. For example, she often doesn't offer translations for her examples. Less advanced students should consider Schaum's instead.

A Reference Grammar of French (Batchelor and Chebli-Saadi, 2011) Whatever you do, don't buy this one without reading my negative review on Amazon.

Schaum's Outline of French Grammar: Sixth Edition (Crocker, M; 2014) Schaum's outlines are really meant for high school students who have had two years of the language or more and want to prepare themselves for the AP and/or for college placement tests. Their books cover the entire grammar, offer hints for memorizing things like irregular verb forms, and they even include exercises. They don't cover the more exotic details of the languages, though.

German

Hammer's German Grammar and Usage, 5th Edition (Durrell, 2013) By all accounts, this is the best English-language reference grammar for German. After four months of serious German study, I have made extensive use of it; it's excellent. The sections on cases and sentence structure are very detailed and very well organized. As with any reference grammar, it expects the reader to already be an intermediate German speaker with pretty good linguistic sophistication. Schaum's is a good alternative for less-advanced students.

Schaum's Outline of German Grammar, 5th Edition (Gschossmann-Hendershot and Feuerle, 2014) Schaum's outlines are really meant for high school students who have had two years of the language or more and want to prepare themselves for the AP and/or for college placement tests. Their books cover the entire grammar, offer hints for memorizing things like irregular verb forms, and they even include exercises. They don't cover the more exotic details of the languages, though.

Literatur in einfacher Sprache is an excellent collection of Fairy Tales, Legends, Fables, and other stories told in simplified language. Although my goal is to read authentic texts, these stories make a great stepping stone. They're short, they're familiar, and they're not too difficult. And they're free.

I haven't attempted to read any German books yet, so I have no comments on publiched dictionaries at this point. However, the German Wordreference.com is rather poor by comparison to the version for French, Spanish, and Italian. It doesn't have conjugations, it has a much smaller vocabulary, it is missing most phrases, and the discussion forums are also much more limited. Instead, I have made extensive use of Reverso, which is far more complete.

Russian

This is a placeholder for when I resume studying Russian, probably in 2016.

Fundamentals of Russian: revised edition (Lunt, H; Slavika, 1968) I used this text when I studied Russian back in 1992.

Linguistics

I rarely refer to my general linguistics books just to read a novel, but I use these two a lot to try to get better insights into what lies beneath the grammar rules described in the reference grammars above.

Syntax: A Generative Introduction (Carnie, 2012) A heavy-duty book on the Principles and Parameters model for Syntax. It discusses how that model applies to all the languages in the world--not just English. Suitable for undergraduate linguistics majors.

Semantics (Kearns, K; Palgrave, 2011) A heavy-duty book on modern Semantics. I find it helpful for thinking about what different verb tenses really mean. Suitable for linguistics graduate students.

Journals

Reading in a Foreign Language (RFL),  published online twice a year (in April and October) by the National Foreign Language Resource Center, the University of Hawai‘i College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature and the University of Hawai‘i Department of Second Language Studies. This is the place to start when looking for academic papers on learning and teaching L2 reading. It always has great articles, but an especially valuable section is "Reading on L2 reading: Publications in other venues," which gives an extensive review of papers on the topic that have appeared in other publications. Unlike most linguistic papers, most of these papers are very accessible to an educated layman.

Papers

How much input do you need to learn the first 9,000 words? (Nation, Paul, Reading in a Foreign Language, October 2014, pp 1-16). Nation, one of the big names in L2 reading, estimates that a student must acquire 9,000 word-families to read authentic novels without a dictionary. This paper discusses how long that might take, but along the way it gives all sorts of other statistics of interest to foreign-language learners. It is the first paper I have ever seen that made explicit reference to the "touch-to-lookup function in Kindle."