At a certain stage of language learning, or perhaps if you have some passive knowledge of latin words or german words (e.g. Russian has lots of French (which are derived from latin) loan words, which enable me to undestand a lot of "long" words out of the box) you may be able to guess the meaning of the roots of the words. Otherwise I believe this is not really possible due to the ways the langugages develop. For example beauty in Polish sounds almost like ugliness in Russian and they really share the same root. So the shortcut actually is referring to English-English dictionary....