Growing up in the bilingual city of Kyiv in the 1990s, I studied the Ukrainian language like a museum object—intensely, but at a distance, never quite feeling all of its textures or bringing it home.

During my sophomore year of college in 2010, I picked my major: Russian. I had been studying the language and was excited for the opportunity to read literature, learn about another part of the world ...

If you’re traveling soon to a place where you don’t know the language well (or at all), then you’ll want to download a language learning app to your smartphone before you embark on your journey. These ...