Babbel

Babbel is an online tool to help you learn languages. The software itself was developed by software experts and language professionals. The experience is very good with a lot of audio clips and visuals to keep the user entertained. It also has social networking features which allow friends from all around the world to stay in touch; it also gives you the chance to practice your foreign languages. Babbel offers courses in Italian, Spanish, French, English and German with many more languages supposedly in the works. Babbel makes it possible to learn a language while still staying in touch with friends. Learning with Babbel is much more like a game than a chore and its great fun. You can continue reviewing the material until you have mastered and retained all of the information. These training sessions last between 2 and 5 minutes. Babbel was developed based on Adobe’s Flex framework which makes it quite a reliable and robust application. Babbel was founded in August 2007 and is based in Berlin, Germany. The public beta was launched in January 2008. In June 2008 Babbel acquired FriendsAbroad.com and in April 2009 Babbel launched its first paid service which is a Spanish course for German speakers. Unlike some other online language learning websites babble offers free language learning tools. It doesn’t offer as many languages as some, and most of the languages are European. The material offered is involving which will make sure you don’t get bored or feel like you are working too hard. The application has quite a nice design; you do need to have flash installed in order to use the site. If you don’t then you will see a different version of the homepage and a small message telling you that you need flash, this is very easy to miss so can be quite frustrating. When you have signed in you will see your dashboard, this contains lots of useful information. It also allows you to start lessons and practice your chosen language. There are also social networking features built into the site which make practicing your language even easier. Some pages of the site load very slow. Registering for an account is very easy; on the main page of the site you will see a small registration box. You simply need to enter the information including the language that you speak now and the language that you want to learn. When you click on the register button you will then have to enter a username and your email address. You will then be sent a confirmation email which you have to read and click a link inside to confirm your email address. Most Babbel features are free for all users to use, in 2009 they did launch their first paid course for 29 Euros. Babbel is ideal for anyone that wants to learn a new language in a fun and exciting way, sitting down in a classroom isn’t for everyone and this might be just what you need to pick up that new language.