What dictionary or resource to use for hard to find Russian words?

[co6aka]

I am just learning Russian, and depend a lot on electronic translations as I learn, for talking to my Russian friends. I use @PROMT, Babelfish, and Paralink for the basic translations. I reverse the translation when I write, to check for misunderstood words.

However, when I get a letter from my friends, they either use transliteration (which varies from person to person), mix English and Russian (very confusing!), use handwriting (hard to tell the letters apart!), or they use words that the translators can't understand, and are not in my paper dictionaries. (I even have a slang disctionary!)

I was wondering what other resources I might use to get those critical last few words out of a letter. It seems to be just my luck that the words are placed in very bad spots, and the whole meaning of the letter can depend on the translation.

Oh, it might be important to let you know that most of my freinds are Ukrainian, and speak Russian. I don't know if Ukrainian Russian has it's own dialect....

Thanks in advance

[10-4]

Your correspondents often use misspelled words, and none of electronic translators will help you with that.

[Usher]

I would say "ukranian russian" tends to be somehow less slang`ish than native russian. No dialect per-se exists. Some phonetics differ - but written language is the same.

[2pizza]

Some time ago I saw some nice dictionaries of "new Russian words" in a shop - one was a translation (RU-EN) dictionary, and the other Russian slang (RU - RU). These might be helpful (if you find them). YOu might try and visit Ozone.ru to buy these. But pray do not use the words in your speech. That's just to help you understand your friends.
just in case, details of some books I've been able to find in the runet:
http://scientificbooks.com.ru/bolsoislovarmolodejn.shtml
http://childrenworld.com.ru/get.pl?g=tolkovyislovarmolode
http://detsk.shopbrowser.ru/sbproduct-121143.html
http://www.yandex.ru/yandsearch?stype=&nl=0&text=словарь+молодежного+сленга
Успехов.

[co6aka]

Thanks for the comments and translation help. I was beginning to worry that my years of experience learning other languages was not going to help me with Russian. I realize that German and Latin have similar usages of declentions and congigations. Word order is quite different, I think.

Reading a Russian-English dictionary seems much harder for me than other language dictionaries. I suspected that the words I could not find were slang or mispelled. However, I haven't reached the point where I can figure out a mispelled word. In English, it is not so difficult, since the phonetics are usually very close.

I read Russian magazines (lucky to have a Russian shop very close by my home) and watch Russian Television. But without emmersion, I find that I understand many words, but cannot get the sentence structure together to figure out what words go in what order. Sometimes this can be very funny, when I find out the accurate meaning....

A word to the wise... Never ever sit listening to two Russian speaking women discussing you in front of them. Just hearing my name and words like Horosho and Bolshoi, with Nyet and bleen, can drive a man crazy!

Thanks again!