Google Translate now lets you build your own phrasebook

Before you go abroad, or meet someone from another country who speaks a different language, it can be useful to come up with some handy phrases to use. Even if it’s just "how are you?" and "nice to meet you".

You can probably memorize the basics quite quickly, but for more involved phrases you may require a bit of help to recall them, which is where Phrasebook for Google Translate comes in.

The new addition lets you save the most useful phrases for easy reference later on, hopefully also helping you commit them to memory. To use it, just translate something, then click the star icon under the translated text to add it to your phrasebook.

You can view all of the stored translations by clicking the new Phrasebook icon. If you’re translating phrases into more than one language a drop down menu will let you filter your list by language pair (English > Spanish, English > French, French > English and so on).

Hovering your mouse over a phrase will display a text-to-speech option and you’ll be able to listen to how a native speaker says it.

Photo Credit: Lightspring/Shutterstock