Google translate for me is good in the pre-intermediate stage of learning. You can shove in groups of words and it's a nice heuristic. But I always keep in mind

Google translate for me is good in the pre-intermediate stage of learning. You can shove in groups of words and it's a nice heuristic. But I always keep in mind that it's likely to fall apart on longer sentences - I use it to "Fill the gaps" in grammatical constructs I know. It's a great enabling technique I got to around upper intermediate in another language last year, and found it much less useful at that point. I was able to spot bad grammar and translations myself - I was much better off picking individual words from the dictionary.