Which languages and destinations does Phrazl cover?
Phrazl is built for ten destinations and the language you will actually be speaking in each one, from Portuguese in Portugal to Thai in Thailand. Below is the full list, the five situations each language covers, and an honest note on where the coverage stops, with the caveat that Phrazl has not opened yet, so the list is what the first release is being built to cover.
Ten destinations, and the language each one speaks
Phrazl is not a general language school with a long menu. It is built around a fixed set of ten destinations, each with pre-curated phrase sets per language and scenario, ordered by how likely you are to need the phrase on the trip rather than by grammatical difficulty.
It has not opened yet. So read everything below as what the first release is being built to cover, not as a catalogue that already exists for you to buy today and not as a list we can promise will keep growing on a timetable.
The list
- Portugal, in Portuguese
- Spain, in Spanish
- France, in French
- Italy, in Italian
- Germany, in German
- Greece, in Greek
- Japan, in Japanese
- China, in Mandarin
- South Korea, in Korean
- Thailand, in Thai
Destinations are chosen at country level, not city level, because the phrase sets are written per language and scenario. A week in Kyoto and a week in Osaka draw on the same Japanese set. You pick the destination, then your departure date, then up to three scenarios from restaurant, transport, hotel, emergency and shopping, and the review schedule is calibrated to the date you gave it.
Three is the cap per trip, not a suggestion: a single trip is set up around three scenarios at most, whichever pack you own. If you want all five for one destination, that is a second trip for the same place, with its own departure date and its own schedule.
Questions
What languages does Phrazl cover?
Ten, one for each destination on the list: Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and Thai. Each language has pre-curated phrase sets built per scenario and ranked by trip relevance, so the first thing you practise in Greek is the thing a visitor to Greece is most likely to say out loud. There is no eleventh language hiding behind a setting. If your language is not in that list of ten, Phrazl is not being built to teach it in the first release.
Which situations does each language cover?
Five: restaurant, transport, hotel, emergency and shopping. They are the situations people name when they say they are worried about getting by, and each one is a separate phrase set within the language. On setup you choose up to three of the five for one trip, which keeps the curriculum small enough to finish before you fly, and that cap of three holds even on the full bundle, so covering all five for a single destination means setting up a second trip for it. The emergency set is practice for general communication only, not a substitute for local emergency services or a qualified interpreter, and the argument for drilling those lines months early rather than the week you need them is on our Thai emergency phrases page.
How many phrases are there per language?
Fifty phrases per scenario. A trip pack with three scenarios is therefore up to 150 phrases for one destination, and the full bundle covers 2,500 phrases across every destination and all five scenarios. Because the sets are ordered by trip relevance, the count matters less than the order: stop halfway and you still have the half that gets used. Nobody needs 2,500 phrases for one week in Lisbon, which is why the trip pack exists.
Is the audio recorded by a native speaker?
No, and we would rather you heard that here than discovered it after paying. Every phrase in all ten languages is spoken by a synthesised voice, labelled as such in the app. What the paid pack is built to give you is each phrase at speed or slowed down so you can copy it, plus a written pronunciation guide, and a listen-and-repeat mode built around saying it back out loud. If a native recording is the thing you are shopping for, that is a fair reason to choose something else.
Do all three learning modes work the same in every language?
Flashcard and listen and repeat behave identically across the ten. Fill in the blank hides one word of the phrase and asks you to pick it, which depends on the language being written with spaces between words, so in Japanese, Mandarin and Thai it falls back to the whole phrase rather than a single word. For Japan, China and Thailand, that means two modes doing word-level work and the third acting as a recognition check. It is a limit of the script, not of your attention, and it is better known before you buy than mid-session the night before a flight.
Can I try a language before paying?
Not today, because Phrazl has not opened: signing up now joins the waitlist rather than starting a trial. The free preview is built to cover one trip set up and give you the first 20 phrases of it, with audio on every one and the departure countdown and review schedule running, before any payment is asked for. That is meant to be enough to hear what the Japanese set sounds like, or whether the Spanish restaurant phrases match the trip you are actually taking. There is no subscription behind it: the paid trip packs are one-time purchases through Stripe.
Can I cover more than one destination?
Yes, that is what the full bundle is for. A trip pack is $9.99 once and covers one destination with up to three of the five scenarios. The full bundle is $19.99 once and covers all ten destinations and all five scenarios across as many trips as you like, with new trips set up any time and no further purchase, but the three-scenario cap per trip holds on the bundle too: one trip gets three of the five, and the remaining two for that same destination mean setting up a second trip for it. Buying a second destination as a separate trip pack instead earns the returning traveller discount of $5, applied at checkout once you already own a pack. Each trip keeps its own departure date, so a June trip to Greece and a September trip to Japan are scheduled independently.
What if my destination is not one of the ten?
Then Phrazl has nothing for you yet, and we are not going to dress up a near-miss as coverage. A phrase curriculum built for the wrong language is worse than no app at all when you have six weeks and a flight booked. Join the waitlist and tell us where you are going, because that is the only evidence that decides what gets built after the first ten. Until then, something else will serve you better.