Talking Phrasebooks make for Great Travel Companions

The Talking Phrasebooks apps from UK application developer Coolgorilla offer basic phrases and dictionaries in six languages (Spanish, French, German, Italian, Greek and Portuguese) with over 350,000 downloads so far and Spanish being the most popular language.

Although competitors iLingo (benchmark product of application developer Talking Panda) and Lonely Planet both offer phrasebooks in a wider array of languages with a slightly broader range of phrases and words, they both charge $9.99 per app while the Talking Phrasebooks apps from Coolgorilla are free, thanks to the sponsorship of online travel retailer Lastminute.com.

The great advantage to a paper phrasebook here is the sound button, which allows you to hear the phrases that you are translating.  So you can either try and repeat what you hear or if in a pronunciation bind you can simply hold your iPhone up and let it do the talking for you.

This is obviously not for anyone who is trying to seriously learn a language but on a quick trip abroad this app can turn out to be a great companion.