GoKawiilRita El Khoury / Android Authority
Learning languages was never on my to-do list. I grew up speaking Arabic and French natively, then English slowly shifted from a middle school course to an essential part of my life through movies, TV shows, and music. When my highschool offerred Spanish courses, I took one lesson and walked out. Three was enough.
But things changed when I met my husband, who also speaks Spanish. A word here, a sentence there, a honeymoon in Valencia, some YouTube videos, and I suddenly realized I could understand Spanish without trying. It was too close to French to be difficult. Something similar happened with Italian. Still, I needed lessons from a good language-learning app. So, I started with Duolingo, got bored with it, then tried Memrise, and fell in love. In less than three weeks, I was able to learn enough German to make it to Berlin and sort of understand all kinds of conversations around me. But Memrise changed over time — it got prohibitively more expensive, it nearly abolished the free tier, and a lot of the charm slipped away.
I went back to Duolingo and hated it enough to completely stop trying to learn any language. Perhaps music and movies would be enough. That is, until I started using Babbel several weeks ago, and now, I’m in love.
What's your favorite language-learning app? 31 votes Babbel 48 % Duolingo 23 % Memrise 10 % Drops 0 % Google Translate's new language feature 16 % Other (tell us in the comments) 3 %
Babbel doesn’t teach me to say “the turtle eats the apple”
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
Part of Duolingo’s terrible approach is its repetitiveness and the absolutely useless sentences it teaches you when you start a new course. There’s only so many times I can tap “Mutter” for mother and “Vater” for father before I blow a fuse and close the app. That’s without mentioning all the useless sentences that I would never, ever need when I traveled to Germany. The turtle eating an apple, the cousin reading a book — those are not things I’d ever say. I need to know how to ask for the toilet, how to find the next train, and how to order at a restaurant and pay my bill. Now, that’s useful.
Memrise used to do that very well, and Babbel takes a similar approach. The courses started with useful conversations. Greeting people, introducing yourself, saying where you come from and where you live, describing apartments, ordering food, asking for directions, and so on. These are all part of the A1.1 (a.k.a. Newcomer I) lessons, and they make so much sense to start with.
There’s a flashcard element to Babbel that works well for my brain, with photos, written text, and pronunciation all combining to help me remember that “das Bröt” is bread. But Babbel takes things further with extra tooltips that explain different concepts. Like the fact that adding “-chen” implies a smaller version, so “das Brötchen” is a smaller bread.
... continue reading