Learning a new language can be hard. Most people are familiar with the 10,000-hour rule — made popular by writer Malcolm Gladwell — that suggests it takes 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to become an expert in any given field. While the rule has been disputed, it still takes hundreds (if not thousands) of hours to become fluent in a second language, never mind a third or fourth.

The vast majority of us don’t have that kind of time to dedicate to the study of a new language, especially if we’re gearing up for our next international adventure. We might arm ourselves with a few useful phrases like how to ask where the restroom is, and then turn to a translation app to help us out with the rest.

Translations apps aren’t perfect, but they’re certainly better than nothing. They’re improving all the time, and can be a valuable tool if you do decide to learn another language down the road. That being said, nothing beats actually learning a new language, but translation apps will get the job done (with only a handful of errors). Maybe one of these days Google will perfect its real-time translations earbuds and we won’t have the need to learn any more languages. But in the meantime, we’ve found the best translation apps.