Listen and repeat with audio, plus two more ways to practise

You can recognise the words for "the bill, please" on a screen, pick them out of four options, feel briefly competent, and then stand at the counter with nothing coming out. Recognition is cheap. Production is the expensive part, and it is the only part the waiter, the taxi driver and the hotel desk ever see.

Most phrase practice leans on the eye. You match, you tap, you scroll past a translation and assume the sound will arrive later. It does not arrive later. The first time your mouth attempts a phrase should not be in front of a stranger with a queue behind you, because that is the moment the vowel collapses and you default to English with an apologetic hand gesture.

Listen and repeat removes that gap in the only way available before departure: you hear the phrase, you say it back, out loud, more than once. Every phrase in Phrazl carries audio for exactly that, 2,500 clips across the destinations we cover, playable at normal speed or slowed down so you can copy it syllable by syllable, with the pronunciation written out underneath. Then the same phrase is available in two other modes, so you are not just parroting a sound you could not reconstruct on your own.

The ten destinations in setup today are Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, China, South Korea, Thailand and Greece. That is one country per language and there is no search box, so there is no Mexico row, no Brazil row and no Austria row, and no Dutch at all, which means a Netherlands trip has nothing to practise here yet.

Listen and repeat

This is the mode we have put the most work into, and audio plays on every phrase set. Three rough edges are worth hearing before you lean on it. A clip can keep sounding over the next phrase if you advance while it is playing, so stop it before you move on. The audio files are not labelled the way every browser wants them: Chrome plays them anyway, Safari on an iPhone can refuse, and when it refuses the play button simply does nothing and nothing on screen tells you why. And the play control is a small, quiet circle next to the text while the big button belongs to "Check the text", which is backwards on the one mode whose entire point is hearing the phrase. All three are on the list, and the free preview is the place to find out how your own phone behaves.

Flashcard

The loop itself is straightforward: the phrase is prompted, you recall it out loud, you reveal it and grade yourself. Two blemishes. The prompt names the country rather than the language, so you get "Say this in Portugal" where it should read "in Portuguese", which is wrong on a page that is otherwise careful about the difference. And a second tap on the reveal button while a grade is still saving can leave the next card showing its answer. Together with listen and repeat, this is the pair we would plan on carrying the work.

Fill in the blank

Still the mode we are tightening. For Japanese, Chinese and Thai it cannot blank a single word inside a phrase, because those scripts are not written with spaces, so it falls back to asking for the whole line. Everywhere else the option list can give itself away twice over: by position, usually the bottom option, and by capitalisation, because the distractors are lifted verbatim from other phrases while the blanked word was the first in its sentence. On a very short review queue it can end up offering a single option, which is the answer by itself. When you choose wrong, the screen shows the correct word marked in red rather than the word you actually picked, which reads backwards, and whole-line options spill out of their box on a narrow phone. Treat this mode as a bonus rather than a reason to buy.

On a phone, and when nothing is due

In all three modes the action you tap most sits in the top third of the screen with dead space beneath it, so a twelve-card loop makes your thumb reach up every time. Anchoring those controls lower is a known fix. Separately, all three modes stay visible on the trip screen even when your schedule has nothing due, and tapping one then opens an empty session; the same screen can tell you nothing is due while it also counts the phrases you have not said yet. Those two lines contradicting each other is a known rough edge and it is on the list to put right.

Splitting practice modes across price tiers would be an odd way to sell a product whose whole argument is that you should be able to say things out loud. So all three modes travel together, and the only gate is on phrases.

The numbers, in plain terms. A paid trip carries 50 phrases per scenario, ordered by trip relevance, so a three-scenario trip comes to 150 phrases with audio on every one of them. Across all ten destinations and all five scenarios that is 2,500 phrases in total. The free preview gives you the first 20 phrases of a trip, with audio on each, which is enough to judge the voice, the slowed playback and the pronunciation guide before you decide anything.

One thing to expect, because it looks like a bug and is not. The readiness bar measures coverage against the phrases you can actually reach, so on the free preview ten of your twenty phrases reads as half the set. The moment a purchase lands, the denominator becomes the full trip set, and the same ten phrases read as a much smaller number. Nothing on the screen currently explains the drop, so hear it here: you did not lose progress, the set got bigger.

The prices are settled and nothing recurs. A trip pack is $9.99 once for one destination and up to three of the five scenarios. The full bundle is $19.99 once for every destination Phrazl covers, all ten languages and all five scenarios, with new trips set up any time and no further purchase. Buy a second destination later and a returning traveller discount of $5 comes off at checkout. Payments run through Stripe when checkout opens, and there is no subscription to remember to cancel after your holiday.

We are on a waitlist while the phrase sets and the audio are finished across the ten destinations, and while checkout is switched on. Nothing on this page is a report of how it went for other travellers, because there are no other travellers yet. It is a description of what the product is built to do, and where the build currently stands, including the parts that are not finished.

If you have a departure date and a scenario you are quietly dreading, join the list. You sign in with an email address and a password, and a reset email goes out through Resend if you ask for one. Your trips, your chosen scenarios and your review history per phrase are kept while your account exists, along with the Stripe record of anything you buy, any support request you send, and one timestamped milestone per trip when you set it up, finish the free 20, see the paywall, start a checkout or complete a purchase, which is how we find out where people stop. All of it lives in a managed Postgres database on Amazon Web Services, and server logs roll off within 30 days. Delete a single trip and its review history yourself from that trip's edit screen, or use the delete account button on your account screen to remove the account, trips, review history, purchase records and support requests at once. Stripe keeps its own payment records as the law requires.

There is no support email address: purchase and refund problems are raised from the support form on the account screen, which is the one route we can actually answer. There is also no data export of your review history, no two-factor authentication today, and no independent security audit. If you want the deadline mechanics behind all of this, the page on the compressing review schedule explains the scheduler, the page on three-step trip setup covers how a trip is defined, and the guide on learning a language in three months before a trip is the method with no app in it at all.