Different techniques work well depending on your current level. Immersion always helps, and for me recently that meant diving into reading online news articles

Different techniques work well depending on your current level. Immersion always helps, and for me recently that meant diving into reading online news articles in French, which really helped with expressions, idioms, and jokes. I tried a few "Google Translate" chrome extensions but none were good for looking up just a phrase effectively, so I wrote my own, BabelFrog. It has almost no options (just From and To languages) and instantly displays of the translate of the word or phrase you selected. Give it a try maybe. http://babelfrog.com/ http://babelfrog.com/