Whether you learn best by reading, writing, speaking, seeing or listening, Babbel is built to bolster your language knowledge by teaching you in a way that is best for you. From app lessons to live online classes to games, videos, podcasts and more, with Babbel you'll do more than learn to speak a language.

Babbel is a good resource for learning vocabulary, everyday phrases and constructing basic sentences – especially for complete newcomers and beginners in a language. If you're learning Spanish or French, you can get a lot more out of it, as these courses take you to an advanced level.

Branding. The word Babbel is derived from the Hebrew verb בָּלַל (bālal), meaning to jumble or to confuse your words. It is also a pun on the biblical Tower of Babel - a gigantic ziggurat whose construction was interrupted when the workers' languages were made mutually unintelligible by God.

The biggest difference between Babbel and Duolingo is the approach to language learning. Babbel is a better option if you want traditional language instructions through modules and lessons. By contrast, Duolingo works great if you need a playful, gamified experience.

With Babbel, you can learn when you want and how you want. In addition to lessons on the app, we offer games, podcasts, Live lessons and more that fit into your schedule. You can also refresh your memory with our review manager, which is personalized to focus on the words and phrases you need to work on most.

Babbel Free vs Paid Well, the short answer is that Babbel's free version is just access to one of the lessons (the first lesson) from the full course. And obviously, the paid version includes full access to their language courses, including all of Babbel's lessons, grammar instruction, and games.

While Duolingo offers its app for free with adverts and Memrise and Busuu both offer some free tiered services, Babbel is paid-for only. That focus on paid-only has lowered the amount of users Babbel has obtained, it only reached 10 million total subscriptions purchased in October 2020.

Unlike some of its competitors Babbel does not offer real time instruction from a language teacher. Though it has digital tools that can mimic some of the affordances of having an actual instructor, these tools are not as effective or efficient as a real instructor.

Duolingo offers over 20 languages, so you'll have over twice as many language options as Babbel. Compared to Babbel, Duolingo's main weakness is that it doesn't have example conversations. However, if full conversations aren't your thing, Duolingo may be an ideal alternative to Babbel.

Yes, it is free to download the Babbel app. It does not cost any money to download their mobile app from the app store on iOS or Android. Once you download the app and create an account for yourself, you will be able complete one lesson per language course absolutely free.

Babbel offers several different monthly subscription options, which all retail for $15 per month. However, as Babbel is almost always running sales, the true cost for Babbel's subscription options after applying discounts is closer to $7 to $14 per month.

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