Learn Spanish with babbel.com app review: basic & advanced vocabulary trainer

Introduction

Learn Spanish with babbel.com is a language learning app that supplies you the first handful of lessons free. This method makes you, amongst other exercises, repeat the word being said by the app. It then records this (which is not very accurate, as background sounds need to be at a minimum) and rates it on a scale of zero to 100%. This app requires a subscription to make full use of its services and features. 

Subscriptions

Learn Spanish with babble.com is not a bad app per se. The method used is quite good, while the app itself has a nice design to it and uses a lot of pictures to illustrate what you’re learning. It’s a shame that there is no option to buy the complete lesson pack, as all content is available only by subscription. Subscribing is being done via their website and gets cheaper per month the longer you subscribe. Prices vary between $7.45 to $12.95 per month. 

Different exercises to perfect your skills

Other exercises have you match a word with a picture, type the word in Spanish and listen to pronunciations. It’s all pretty basic training stuff that most apps in the Appstore will support, some even for free. When having to type the word, the app doesn’t allow any freedom and basically just gives you the letters. It doesn’t let you try accents or any different letters then in the word, which could easily be compared to a guessing game. Matching a word with a picture is easy, as it will basically show you what you need to tap.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Relevant photo illustrations
• A lot of paid for content

Cons

• Boring tests
• Badly designed exercises
• Expensive subscription model
• Speech recognition doesn’t work well

Conclusion

Learn Spanish with babbel.com is, compared to other language learning apps, a very meager and expensive alternative. You get the first lesson for free, as a teaser, but then you’ll be forced to subscribe. There are a lot better paid apps out there, and even a few better free ones. I’m sure the method babble.com uses is good, but seeing that it’s so expensive, I would recommend against using this app.