Useful foreign phrases

A collection of phrases in many different languages with sound files for some of them. Some of these pages may be a bit slow to load due to the number of languages on them.

Greetings and small talk

Welcome
Hello
Good morning
Good afternoon
Good evening
Good night
Good bye
How are you?
Long time no see

What's your name?
Where are you from?
Pleased to meet you
Good luck
Cheers/Good health
Bon appetit
Bon voyage
Excuse me

Sorry
How much is this?
Thank you
Where's the toilet?
Have a nice day
Get well soon
Would you like to dance?
I love you

Language difficulties

I don't understand
Please say that again
Please speak more slowly
Please write it down
How do you say ...?
Do you speak ...?

Emergencies

Leave me alone!
Help! Fire! Stop!
Call the police!

Time expressions

Days of the week
Months of the year
Seasons

Special occasions

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Happy Easter
Happy Birthday

'Useful' phrases

My hovercraft is full of eels
One language is never enough
Stop the world, I want to get off!
This gentleman/lady will pay for everything

Idioms

It's all Greek to me
It's raining cats and dogs
As easy as falling off a log
A sandwich short of a picnic
When pigs fly

Tongue twisters

Proverbs, quotations and sayings about language

Phrases in individual languages

Afrikaans
Albanian
Aleut
Arabic (Modern Standard)
Armenian
Azeri
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Breton
Bulgarian
Cantonese
Catalan
Cebuano
Chabacano
Chamorro
Chinese (Mandarin)
Cornish
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Esperanto
Estonian
Faroese
Farsi (Persian)
Fijian
Finnish
French
Friulian
Georgian
German
Greek

Greenlandic
Hakka
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Inuktitut
Iñupiaq
Irish (Gaelic)
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Jenesch
Jèrriais
Kazakh
Korean
Kurdish
Lakota
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lingua Franca Nova
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malay
Maltese
Mandarin
Manx
Māori
Mongolian

Nepali
Norwegian
Occitan
Persian (Farsi)
Polish
Portuguese (Brazilian)
Portuguese (European)
Romanian
Russian
Scots
Scottish Gaelic
Serbian
Sesotho
Shanghainese
Shona
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swahili
Swedish
Tagalog
Taiwanese
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Xhosa
Yiddish
Zulu

If you would like to make any corrections or additions, please contact me. If you can provide audio recordings of any of these phrases, please send them to

You can send me audio files in any format. If you don't know how to make recordings on a computer, you can send me recordings on audio cassette. Let me know if you want to do this and I'll send you my snailmail address. Or you can call me on Skype (omniglot) and I'll do the recording.

When learning your alphabet was there are rhyme or song you used to help remember the letters? If so, could you make a recording of it and send it to me?

I made sound files of some of the French, German and Spanish phrases using the text to speech program at: http://public.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

People who have contributed to this section

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

Links

Other collections of phrases in various languages
http://www.smartphrase.com
http://www.single-serving.com
http://www.nypl.org/branch/central/dlc/df/useful.html
http://www.travelphrases.info/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/quickfix/
http://www.geocities.com/mailjohan/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_phrases_in_different_languages
http://wikitravel.org/en/Phrasebook
http://www.elite.net/~runner/jennifers/
http://www.smartphrase.com
http://www.loecsen.com
http://www.linguanaut.com
http://www.languageshome.com
http://www.foreignlanguagephrases.com
http://www.lingo24.com/useful-phrases.html
http://worldphrasebook.net
http://smallmarble.org/

They Thought You Would Say This: Unlikely phrases from real phrasebooks
http://www.zompist.com/thought.html

Emergency multilingual phrasebook in 36 languages produced by the British Red Cross
http://www.dh.gov.uk/

Silent Night in numerous languages (includes audio for some languages)
http://silentnight.web.za/translate/

Names of days and months in many languages
http://www.domesticat.net/misc/monthsdays.php

Der Kleine Prinz in 100 Sprachen - extracts from The Little Prince in 100 languages (includes audio): http://www2.germanistik.uni-halle.de/prinz/karten/

Mama Lisa's World - a collection of children's songs from around the world in their original languages with English translations.Some songs include musical recordings and sheet music: http://www.mamalisa.com/world/

How to say "Oh my god! There's an axe in my head" in various languages
http://www.yamara.com/axe/

The Phrase Finder - the meanings and origins of many English sayings, phrases and idioms
http://www.phrases.org.uk

Other multilingual pages: