Intermediate-task training---fine-tuning a pretrained model on an intermediate task before fine-tuning again on the target task---often improves model performance substantially on language understanding tasks in monolingual English settings. We investigate whether English intermediate-task training is still helpful on non-English target tasks. Using nine intermediate language-understanding tasks, we evaluate intermediate-task transfer in a zero-shot cross-lingual setting on the XTREME benchmark. We see large improvements from intermediate training on the BUCC and Tatoeba sentence retrieval tasResearch goal: Does the performance gain from intermediate-task training on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer (XTREME-R F1 scores) vary significantly across different language families or typological features of target languages, and if so, which families or features benefit the most?Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.3/10.