Babbel is a large online language course provider based in Berlin, Germany. In this post I take a look at their course offers, and attempt to answer the question: “Is Babbel Worth it?”
Updated December, 2020.
Babbel is a very affordable online language course provider, that features familiar quiz-style course elements combined with exercises, pronunciation and grammar trainers as well as vocabulary practice tools.
They offer English speakers 13 languages to pick from, with each subscription being purchased separately.
You can also learn English with Babbel from Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swedish, and Portuguese.
Alright, let's dive into the core of what Babbel offer.
At this point we have to split the review in two parts, because Babbel offers two distinctly different style of courses, depending on what language you're learning.
One is amazing, and is worth every penny of the subscription costs – while the other is terrible, and not even worth doing if you got it for free.
Unfortunately Babbel (at the time of writing this review) chooses to continuously offer both the superior and inferior courses at the same time, and what is even more unfortunate, at the same price…
Here's a quick video I recorded to show these differences:
The “good” languages – Spanish, and French
These languages have significantly better courses than the rest of the languages of Babbel.
Here's how they work.
First you learn a few key phrases, which are super relevant and important for those first few conversations you're bound to have in Spanish.
Once you've learnt these, you are immediately put into a conversation in Spanish!
This is the FIRST lesson!!
I think this is extraordinary.
Not only do you learn very useful and practical vocabulary, but you get to learn it in context.
The audio quality is very high, and the Spanish sounds extremely natural.
As an added bonus, there is also a ton of content available for each language, easily worth the small monthly cost.
So, if you're learning Spanish or French then Babbel is amazing.
The “bad” languages – Italian, German, Danish + all others!
Where the Spanish and French language courses were exciting, immersive, and taught useful language the courses for these languages are just terrible.
They are boring, and teach word-by-word vocabulary, with the most dragged out voice artists I've ever heard (the Danish course being particularly guilty of this)
