Babbel.com Blends Language Learning With Social Networking

Designed by a team of software experts and language-instruction professionals at the Berlin-based company Lesson Nine, Babbel provides an enjoyable, intuitive approach to learning via cutting-edge applications, audio cues and user-generated visuals. It also enables users around the globe to connect with and learn from each other – whether surfing in their homes, offices or dorm rooms, or out and about with their phones and PDAs.

With courses in German, English, French, Italian and Spanish – and more languages slated for inclusion – Babbel.com blends the pleasures of social networking with playful but effective vocabulary-developing and sentence-building tools. In place of traditional flash cards for users to shuffle repetitively, Babbel’s system manages the content for review until the material has been mastered; game-like multimedia “trainers,” exercise applications lasting 2-5 minutes, can be adjusted to the user’s specifications. The entire user experience is intended to emulate the joys of console gaming rather than the rote labors of the classroom or instructional CDs.

What’s more, members of the Babbel community teach one another as Tandem Partners, messaging one another within the site and developing a study curriculum together. An upcoming iteration of the site will also include an innovative chat feature, whereby a user will be able to record audio clips in his/her native language and then upload these clips for the edification of community members who are studying that language.

Users may also upload and share their own images, both for networking purposes and as learning aids to reinforce the meanings of words and phrases. Naturally Babbel requires that the rights to every image either be controlled by the user or reside in the public domain.

Users build a personal vocabulary list on Babbel, and every recap is stored in an online database – so the site remembers what users need to review an when. The intervals are automatically adjusted to the users’s learning progress to optimize the memorizing effect. Plans are also in the works for custom-designed lessons including grammar topics.

Developed as a Rich Internet Application (RIA) with Adobe’s Flex framework for Flash and Ruby on Rails, Babbel is operationally robust and highly intuitive, regardless of the user’s technological aptitude.

But Babbel isn’t exclusively for language students; its community features enable all manner of international networking and socializing. “Whether you want to practice conversation with a native speaker or just meet a nice French girl, Babbel makes the process easy and fun,” says Markus Witte, Managing Director of Marketing and Content, whose background includes not only extensive online marketing and management experience but also an academic grounding in language, cultural theory and media.

Founders Thomas Holl and Toine Diepstraten, meanwhile, have nearly two decades of collective experience in application development, IT management, community cultivation and interactive media between them. The rest of the Babbel team reflects a thoughtful balance of new-media savvy and academic foundation; Managing Director of Product Design and Finance Lorenz Heine was a co-founder and CFO of Native Instruments and has extensive entrepreneurial experience in the software industry, while Content Manager Ulrike Kerbstat holds Master’s degrees in language instruction and interpreting, and is fluent in German, English and French.

The site’s name derives from babbeln, a verb in the Swabian German dialect meaning casual, vivid speech that is closely related to the English word babble. Both words were formed in reference to he biblical Tower of Babel, where it is said that one original language became many. The name reflects the site’s potential for making meaningful connections between languages while also hinting at the kind of fun, casual exchanges that await users in Babbel’s unique social network.

Babbel’s founders feel the site will offer sweeping new possibilities to people all over the world who want to learn new languages but shy away from the stereotypically dry and tedious methods of traditional language instruction. With Babbel’s dynamic community growing by the thousands since the launch of the public beta, a new world of language instruction has arrived.