Phrasebooks for real-life situations

Ready-made phrase packs for what textbooks skip - doctor, government office, bank - grouped by language pair. Free, no signup.

Russian to Polish

Survival Polish for Russian speakers: job interviews, renting a flat, school, doctor visits, government offices, and banking - with the false-friend traps Slavic speakers keep hitting.

10 scenarios
Spanish to English

Survival English for Spanish speakers: the DMV, the clinic, the job interview, renting an apartment and enrolling your kids in school - with the falsos amigos that make you say embarrassed when you mean pregnant.

5 scenarios
French to English

Working English for French speakers: job interviews, meetings, travel and the doctor's office - with the faux amis that turn eventually, actually and library into traps.

4 scenarios
English to Japanese

Survival Japanese for the konbini, the train, the restaurant, the ryokan and the pharmacy, with romaji on every line - and the wasei-eigo words that sound English and mean something else.

5 scenarios
English to Vietnamese

Survival Vietnamese for street food, Grab rides and markets - with the tone pairs that separate table from sell, and salt from mosquito.

3 scenarios
English to Portuguese

Brazilian Portuguese for the airport, restaurants, the beach, markets and pharmacies - with the false friends that turn pretend into intend, and esquisito into anything but exquisite.

6 scenarios
English to Italian

Italian for the airport, restaurants, trains, hotels and markets - with the false friends that turn factory into farm and obliterate into validate your ticket.

6 scenarios
English to German

German for the Bürgeramt, flat viewings, the doctor and the supermarket checkout - with the false friends that turn a Gift into poison and bekommen into become.

4 scenarios

What is in a phrase pack

Every pack covers one situation and nothing else: the pharmacy, the job interview, the ticket machine. Inside are the phrases in the order they actually come up, what the person across the counter is likely to say back, and the false friends that specifically bite in that context. Every live pack carries at least fifteen phrases and four traps, checked by hand rather than generated in bulk.

Nothing here needs an account. Read the phrases on the page, or take any pack to the generator and export it as cards to Anki, Quizlet, Mochi or Brainscape.

Why false friends, not word lists

A vocabulary list sorted by topic teaches you words you could already look up. What it does not teach is the word you are confident about and wrong about. Polish recepta is a doctor's prescription, not a recipe. Obliterare on an Italian station sign means validate your ticket. Portuguese constipado means you have a cold. Those are the mistakes that get you understood as saying something else, and the ones nobody corrects, because the sentence sounded fine.

Each phrasebook is built around that gap first and the vocabulary second. Pick the language pair you need above - each one opens onto its own set of situations.