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If I can give my two cents also. I am Chinese but putonghua is not my native speech and I am learning Chinese secondarily. I agree with the above advise that reading pinyin primarily is worthless for anything more than learning very basic conversational chinese. Most translations of the Bible in Chinese (eg. Union version) that I know of, is of a level high enough that it would not make sense phonetically.
Not that I am recommending buying another device right off the bat, but I have Plecodict software on my old Palm TX and the newer version (Version 2) can run off some Axiom PDAs and most smartphones running Windows mobile and also the iphones. I tell you it is a godsend in terms of learning Chinese since you can input words by handwriting (much much faster than looking up by dictionary specially if you can't pronounce the words), and the version 2 can automatically look up definitions on a Chinese text entered on the same device just by pointing at it.
I rarely use my Chinese book dictionaries ever since getting this software and if you really want to learn Chinese (which is a long hard journey), this will save you quite a bit of frustration.
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