How to enable and use per app languages on Android 13
Google surprised everyone by releasing the latest version of its Android operating system ahead of the latest lineup of its hardware devices, and Android 13 is now available ahead of the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. In the past I’ve toyed with the idea of changing the system language on the phone to better facilitate my immersive language learning efforts.
However, being so new to learning Japanese, it just wasn’t practical to switch the entire operating system to that language. It was too difficult to get the full context of my calendar, latest news and more, eventually switched back to English. Unfortunately, there was no middle ground, and my fun little experiment came to an end.
However, something interesting happened with the release of Android 13. Google created a way for users to switch from their native language to an alternate language per app instead of system-wide! Today I show you how to enable and use languages per app so you too can benefit from smaller, more controlled doses of language immersion. For some of you who are bilingual, this feature may be necessary rather than occasionally interesting, as you may feel more comfortable reading certain apps in your native language as opposed to the language you are used to, for business or otherwise speak and interact.
To get started, just open the Settings app on your Android phone and navigate to the System section. From there, tap on “Languages & input” and finally on “App languages”. If you want, you can just open Settings on your phone and use the search bar at the top to type in “app languages” to get you there much faster. Below is an example of this process!
In the list of app languages, you can see all apps that are compatible with this function. However, you will find that not all of your apps have the ability to switch between languages, and each developer needs to enable this on a case-by-case basis.
Luckily, many of your native Google apps can be toggled back and forth at will, and it’s a wonderful way to feel more comfortable and at home with your device, or use it as a real-time learning resource. For example, if you change something like calendar to Japanese, remember that the UI will be converted, but the events will not, since they were created with user-created text.
I just want the steps!
1. open settings” on your Android 13 device
2. Navigate to “System”
3. Tap on “Languages & inputs”
4. Open “App Languages”
5. Choose an application you want to convert
6. Choose a new language from the list of available ones
7. Open this app from your phone’s app launcher and see the results!
