Useful foreign phrases

A collection of useful phrases suitable for a variety of situations in many different languages with sound files for quite a few of them.

Index by phrase | Index by language | Index by language family

Index of phrases by language

  1. Afrikaans | Albanian | Aleut | Alsatian | Amharic | Arabic (Egyptian) | Arabic (Lebanese), Arabic (Modern Standard) | Arabic (Moroccan) | Aragonese | Armenian | Assamese | Azerbaijani |
  2. Basque | Belarusian | Bengali | Bhojpuri | Bosnian | Breton | Bulgarian | Burmese |
  3. Cantonese | Catalan | Cebuano | Chabacano | Chamorro | Chechen | Cherokee | Chinese (Mandarin) | Cornish | Corsican | Croatian | Czech |
  4. Danish | Dutch |
  5. Estonian | Ewe |
  6. Faroese | Fijian | Finnish | French | Friulian | Frisian (North) | Frisian (West) |
  7. Galician | Gascon | Georgian | German | Greek (Modern) | Greek (Ancient) | Greenlandic | Gujarati |
  8. Haitian Creole | Hakka | Hausa | Hawaiian | Hebrew | Hindi | Hungarian |
  9. Iban | Icelandic | Ido | Ilocano | Indonesian | Inuktitut | Iñupiaq | Irish (Gaelic) | Italian |
  10. Japanese | Javanese | Jenesch | Jèrriais |
  11. Kannada | Kazakh | Khmer | Kinyarwanda | Korean | Kurdish |
  12. Lakota | Lao | Latin | Latvian | Lithuanian | Low Saxon | Luxembourgish |
  13. Macedonian | Malay | Malayalam | Maldivian | Maltese | Mam | Mandarin | Manx | Māori | Marathi | Mongolian |
  14. Navajo | Ndebele (Northern), Nepali | Nogai | Norwegian |
  15. Occitan | Okinawan | Oriya |
  16. Papiamento | Pashto | Persian (Farsi) | Polish | Portuguese (Brazilian) | Portuguese (European) | Punjabi |
  17. Quechua |
  18. Romanian | Romansh | Russian |
  19. Sakha | Sanskrit | Samoan | Sardinian | Scots | Scottish Gaelic | Serbian | Sesotho | Shanghainese | Shona | Sicilian | Sinhala | Slovak | Slovenian | Somali | Spanish | Sundanese | Swahili | Swedish | Swiss German |
  20. Tagalog | Tahitian | Taiwanese | Tamil | Tatar | Telugu | Tetum | Thai | Tibetan | Tigrinya | Tok Pisin | Tongan | Tsotsil | Tswana | Tumbuka | Turkish | Tuvaluan |
  21. Ukrainian | Urdu | Uzbek
  22. Venetian | Vietnamese | Võro
  23. Welsh | Wolof
  24. Xhosa
  25. Yiddish | Yoruba | Yucatec Maya
  26. Zazaki | Zulu

Phrases in constructed languages (conlangs)

Esperanto | Interlingua | Ishirkian | Klingon | Lingua Franca Nova | Lojban | Talossan | Toki Pona | Wightian

Index by phrase | Index by language | Index by language family

Other phrases, idioms, time expressions, proverbs and tonguetwisters

Can you provide phrases in other languages? You might find this template (Excel) helpful.

If you'd like to make any corrections or additions, or can provide audio recordings of any of these phrases, please contact me at: my email address

You can record and edit audio files online with Vacaroo or with Audacity. Other audio editors are available here

People who have contributed to this site

Buy phrasebooks from: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr

Links to other collections of phrases

Want to learn a new language? Learn new languages while playing games

Multilingual pages

Useful foreign phrases | Colours | Numerals | Numbers | Time expressions | Kinship terms | Idioms | Proverbs | Tongue twisters | Language names | Country names | UDHR | Tower of Babel | Omniglot | Seven dwarfs

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Copyright 1998- Simon Ager