Babbel

I took out a lifetime subscription to Babbel. I've been learning Spanish on Duolingo for years and thought a different approach might help. I learn new things on topics I'm already familiar with. Let's face it, there's no silver bullet when learning anything—one has to put in the work. Getting a concise overview and knowing what the subject is about help a lot, of course. What bothers me terribly is the continuous woke propaganda. Today it was two lesbians marrying each other. Had they warned me they were this woke, I would never have subscribed. I reviewed them on Trustpilot, and they responded saying, yes, they're woke and they promote woke to the best of their ability. Here's their reply: ----------------------------------------- We at Babbel aim to inspire people from different backgrounds with diverse worldviews to learn new languages. Diversity is one of our core values, and this includes representing different cultures, faiths, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations. This is reflected in our course content and we hope to encourage people to connect through language and try to leave behind their biases. --------------------------------------------- I'm conservative and never will be woke. All they're doing is making another enemy. They should stick to teaching languages and refrain from anything that might interfere with that.

Watch out for their auto renewal trap… – Watch out for their auto renewal trap … Babbel hope you forget to turn off auto renewal like I did and then slug you the full price (which I’d never pay in a million year) then ignore your refund requests. I’ve used Babbel off and on for a few years. I’ve always remembered to turn off auto renewal, but forgot to this last occasion and got hit the full price for a 1 year subscription to an app I haven’t used for 9 months. When I did buy it, I only ever did so at their special offer prices. I’ve requested a refund and heard nothing. Seems dishonest to me. They should send you a reminder email prior to auto renewal being due, that way I can willingly decide if I want to pay that much for their mediocre app. Poor at best from Babbel

Babbel has me babbling – Bonjour I wanted to learn French and I chose Babbel to get started. The introduction (free) was fun enough for me to invest further. If you wait long enough you'll get an offer of ~50% so don't pay list price whatever you do. 50% is just about worth it, but the full price isn't. As at the time of writing, here's my experience thus far. PROs

1. It's got good fun story lines and listening to the accents is quite nice 2. It covers a range of learning types i.e. you speak it, you type it, arrange into correct sentences and read it out loud. 3. There are numerous review and "make it stick" sessions throughout to help consolidate the learning. This includes things like Flashcards, writing, listening and other things. 4. You can do separate practice sessions (akin to review) and include a few games to add some pressure 5. Smartphone App and full web-site versions 6. Listen and learn with French as a separate feature for playing when you're in the garden etc and if you're up for it buy a French Live session (which I haven't).

CONs

1. You cannot go back and easily find what you've learned and when. This is really frustrating. Once you learn the "rule" it's embedded in the course and you can't find it. Many times I want to go back and refresh the rule (and thus the conjugations) so i'm not getting later lessons wrong.

2. You cannot slow down the spoken voices with a simple button press or "option to slow" The French speakers go full bore until you click on the image or text again twice. The 3rd time it slows down. This isn't something obvious at all, you have to discover it. The speed of some of the lessons needs to be slowed down often as all the words sound like they're blending together.

3. This is the worst part... Babbel is expecting all English speakers to understand English Grammar. I haven't learned actual Grammar for a VERY LONG time and having French explained with English Grammar jargon is an epic fail. Here is an example.

"Verbs that don't end with -er tend to have irregular past participles. - J'ai fait du thé. (faire)

The passé composé for verbs that have to do with motion is formed with être. The past participles of irregular motion verbs are also declined.

- Elle est venue chez moi. (venir) - Ils sont partis tard. (partir)"

This is so hard to understand that I end up guessing what it's getting at and then getting it wrong. When this happens i've learned nothing for the coming lesson which is expecting you to understand the principle it just gave you . "Irregular past participles " and "irregular motion verbs " ???

There NEEDS to be a feature here that allows you to click on that grammar encryption and bring up examples that are written in "plain English". There is none of that. So you end up breaking out of Babbel and going to another reference site to try and get those examples you need. This is not a good thing for Babbel which should want you to stick to it's own site.

4. If you want to give Babbel feedback, you need to go to their Wishboard, register the idea and have people vote it up. Just for the English-French section there were 80 odd pages of 10+ ideas per page. Everything I wrote above was already there.. miles down in the rankings. Don't expect any kind of update in the near future, that helps you out.

5. There isn't enough reviewing and testing in my view. I would prefer constant testing and consolidation. The reviews are good, but you might only go over 10 things before you can do no more until another pile of lessons are complete. By then you have new things to consolidate and the older things are slipping away for a random appearance in a review or practice later. You cannot set the amount of practice or reviews you'd like. --------------- So in summary, I AM learning. I do feel more confident at listening to French and understanding more of it. My repertoire of nouns is growing and I do enjoy the testing. However... i'm just not sure I can keep going when I do not comprehend the rules without explanation. It's only becoming more complex as i'm rocking through the lessons. There sorely needs to be explanations and an index of learned subjects you can refer back to.

So as I don't reply up on Babbel only, I bought a companion Dictionary App (french-english) AND a visual French-english book to augment this.

Salut

Don't do it – I purchased a Babbel language program a year ago, never used it and they charged me AGAIN this year. Some sort of subscription scam (I thought I was purchasing ONCE and it becomes ONGOING). Not acceptable.