Acthung, baby! Google Translate is ready to teach you German, Portuguese, and more

Want to instantly enrich your life, make yourself a more attractive job candidate, and maybe impressive a potential love interest? Just learn a new language! Well, maybe “instantly” is oversimplifying things, but picking up a second (or third, or fourth) language is a fantastic way to better yourself. This past summer, Google Translate introduced its own language-learning Practice mode, and we just spotted a few upgrades.

While historically Translate has existed as a solution for gaps in your language portfolio, Practice mode introduced a system for training users to become adept at a new language. So far, it’s been available as a beta, and Google got that testing started with language support that was admittedly a bit limited: Initially, it could teach Spanish or French to English speakers, or English to users who spoke Spanish, French, or Portuguese.

According to Google’s support docs, that’s still all Translate officially handles — but fire up the app today, and you’ll find a whole bunch of additional options present.

Instead of just Spanish and French, we now see Translate offering to help teach English speakers German and Portuguese, as well.

And as far as learning English goes, that option is being extended to speakers of Bengali, German, Hindi, Italian, Dutch, Romanian, Swedish, and Chinese.

That’s major progress, absolutely, but at the same time really highlights just how far this tool still needs to grow. And we’re well aware that Google products (especially in their early days) tend to have a pronounced English bias, so we’re extra curious if we’ll ever see Translate’s Practice mode offer training between two non-English languages.