Babbel – Learn Spanish

I‘ve been using babble now for 4 months learning Spanish from the beginner level. I like how the lessons are sized and progress, the multiple ways, oral, visual of introducing new subjects, how the program collects my acquired vocabulary, and lets me review it. But I‘m frustrated by the lack of one feature: when I am stepping through a lesson, I sometimes want to go just a few steps back to review a point. The program does not allow that, I have to restart the lesson, and redo all the exercises to come to a specific step. That is a waste of my time, it makes the program feel rigid. If it wasn‘t missing this feature, I would whole- heartedly give babble 5 stars.

This is a good program for writing and practicing Spanish at advanced levels. It also does a great job of explaining grammar. However, this is a Castilian Spanish course, not Latin American Spanish and there are differences in pronounciation, especially with “s” and “c” which are typically pronounced with a lisp. And the program does not do a good job training the ear by listening to long passages in Spanish at this point in time. They also don’t give good cues to let you know whether to use “tu” or “usted” or “vosotros” or “ustedes”, which means you have to memorize the sentence associated with the picture. Also, the pictures used are pretty crappy. I signed up for six months and would really like my money back. Duo Lingo is a much better program and you can get a free versions that has advertisements. I had several discussions with the support people at Babbel about a partial refund, but because I bought it through Apple, I needed to go through Apple to get the refund. I appreciate the effort they made to try and resolve the issue, but I am still not planning to use their product.

If you are wanting to refresh your reading and writing skills, this program is very good. The interactive courses walk you through all the technical aspects of Spanish for practicing every part of the language, verb conjugation, placements of nouns and pronouns - indirect and direct, lots of varied vocabulary. But if want to practice the spoken language and actually think in that language, Pimsleur is a much better program. It is all conversation, listening and repeating, helping you think in that language allowing you to use what you learned in practical situations with confidence and competence. Babbel teaching style is translating from English to Spanish. What would make Babbel even better is a section that is just conversation, allowing you to be able to practice conversation Spanish while working on a another task such as gardening, driving, biking, working out at the gym or walking. I did purchase a year Babbel subscription and will use it but still using my tried and true Pimsleur. In fact, Pimsleur program helped me learn Mandarin and French and I was able to quickly able to speak and hear key phrases during my travels.