Phrasebooks offer the seductive illusion of mastering a language at little cost– flip the pages and handle any situation, from booking a room to going on a date to setting a broken leg.
Mostly they are little marvels of pragmatic compression. But for that very reason, I like to find the occasional oddity– sentences you can hardly conceive of ever using, little tidbits of inexplicability in an otherwise ruthlessly disciplined little work.
absurd phrases from phrasebooks in hindi, russian, yiddish, vietnamese and many more