Hi, perhaps I can help too.
For my Abitur in English I had to buy Oxford's Advanced Learner's Dictionary (ALD), where I-don't-know-how-many English expressions are explained with a basic word-pool of 2.000 words; it's english-english and we were allowed to use it in the tests. Perhaps something like that is also available for German. I think that kind of dicionary might be more useful to photoread because you do not get the (more or less) exact translation but you are lead to understand the context and receive some examples for using the words.
hth,
Mina
