Babbel - Language Learning

I love that this exists. You can learn at your own pace as the app guides you through or you can do it your own way. They give you all the lessons and categories that you can skip around on depending on what you want to learn. The goal setting and tracking, helps to keep you learning. NOTE: This WILL NOT work if you don’t make an effort to do at least an exercise a day. Sometimes the tracker doesn’t always seem to update properly, which has affected my streak. That’s can be annoying, but I like that I get 2 streak freezes on Monday, so I don’t always have to learn over the weekend. I am learning Polish, it is a super difficult language and it seems that some of the sentence structure or phrases are a little outdated. The variety of phrases and vocabulary available to practice and sort through (make your own flash card categories) is really amazing! Very helpful to practice and use what you already know. I love that you practice listening, speaking, flashcards, and writing through each lesson, but you can also pick which category you would like to review out of the 4 to hone in whatever you’re struggling with or want to test yourself on. I like that the lessons are not very long and that this app is constantly being updated to work better and perform better for its users. I have not used any other language app. I bought the life subscription when it was on sale. Best purchase I could have ever made!

I recently started hanging out in a Spanish speaking Latino community and decided it would be good to learn español to communicate with them better. After briefly considering a class at a community college, I decided an app would be better for learning at my own pace. I read several reviews of language apps before making a decision and Babbel came highly rated as the one with the most educational pedagogy behind it, as opposed to DuoLingo which is cartoony and gamified. Upon creating my account and selecting a membership option I noticed an option for a lifetime subscription and selected it after mathing it out. At $299 it covers the cost of the yearly plan for 3 years and then you have it for the remainder of your earthly existence, or 100 years, whichever comes first. I have been very happy with my decision so far as I feel I have made more progress in a few weeks than several quarters of Spanish 101 & 102 back in college. With the lifetime subscription I may even venture into another language once I’m comfortable with Spanish. Having native speakers to converse with is also helpful. I have one minor complaint about the latest update. The notification badge on the practice tab used to display the number of practice items, but is now just an orange dot. Could an option to display the number be added back in please? Otherwise I am very happy with the product so far.

Don’t bother wasting your time with Duolingo or Rosetta Stone. Well, unless you want to be fed poorly translated, poorly pronounced vocab with absolutely no context and absolutely no grammar info. Babbel has everything the other popular language apps don’t. It has quick and fun lessons that make you want to keep learning. And it’s the only digital language program (besides the ones that exclusively focus on grammar) that infuses grammar into its lessons. I’ve been using Babbel to help me with my German and it’s proven to be completely worth the money! Instead of just giving words and translations, Babbel teaches case, noun gender, conjugation, sentence structure, etc. in a way that gets the point across but without overwhelming the learner! My only complaint would be to add some non Indo-European languages, such as Mandarin or Modern Hebrew. But honestly, that’s the only “bad thing” I have to say, and not even really a “bad thing” if you’re looking to learn a language that’s offered by Babbel. So if you want to learn another language but don’t know where to start go download Babbel. I know Duolingo looks promising, being free and all, but you won’t learn a tenth of what you’ll learn through Babbel. Of course, no one language app or program can get you completely fluent-this is something that requires years of practice and involvement with native speakers-but you will most definitely learn the basics of the language you choose and you’ll be shocked how much you’ve learned in such a short time!