How to Use Bilingual Dictionaries

By Laura K. Lawless, About.com Guide

Even after you know which word to look up, you still have work to do. Both French and English have a lot of homonyms, or words that look alike but have more than one meaning. It's only by paying attention to context that you can tell whether la mine, for example, is referring to a "mine" or a "facial expression."

This is why making a list of words to look up later isn't always a good idea - if you don't look them up right away, you'll have no context to fit them into. So you're better off looking up words as you go, or at the very least writing down the whole sentence the word appears in. See Tips on improving your French vocabulary for more info.

This is one reason that automatic translators like software and websites aren't very good - they are unable to consider context in order to decide which meaning is most appropriate.