With machine translation, it's obvious why phrasebooks aren't popular anymore. But when I'm learning a new language, I do find it helpful to have a list of comm

With machine translation, it's obvious why phrasebooks aren't popular anymore. But when I'm learning a new language, I do find it helpful to have a list of common phrases to study. While machine translation can help you with literal translations of things you want to say, you can't have high confidence that the translations are the most idiomatic way to express common things. Phrasebooks can help you with that. For example, in Hungarian, the literal translation of "Hi, how are you?" is "Szia, hogy vagy?", but you would almost never say that when greeting someone. Instead you would say, "Szia, jó napot!", which means "Hi, (I wish you a) good day!". If you ask a Hungarian how they are doing without any context you're probably going to put them off.