Using a phone translator is fine for being a tourist or maybe for short business trips. It's super inconvenient if you want to live and work somewhere where the

Using a phone translator is fine for being a tourist or maybe for short business trips. It's super inconvenient if you want to live and work somewhere where they speak that language, though. You need to have your phone on you all the time, otherwise you can't communicate. There is always going to be at least one clause worth of latency in each direction of translation due to differences in word order and semantics, so you'll be at least a sentence or two behind the conversation - whereas if you learn the language, you're interacting in real time. Also do not underestimate the goodwill that comes from being willing to learn a language - people recognize that it's hard, they're going to be much warmer to someone who spent over a thousand hours to reach B2 in their second language vs. someone who downloaded an app instead of putting the effort in. Near real time speech-to-speech machine translation is super cool if you're a tourist visiting a country for a couple weeks, or an employee visiting a factory in a country you don't speak the language. It isn't a replacement for learning a language, though.