FAQ - Online Courses

Courses are at the core of Babbel. They consist of a sequence of 5 to 30 steps. Each step takes 10-15 minutes, making it an ideal daily dose of learning. Every time you open Babbel, you’ll see the next step on your personal homepage. You shouldn’t have to think too much about what’s best to study next – our language teachers have already put together a bunch of suggestions for you.

Of course, you don’t have to take us up on our suggestions, you’re welcome to skip that step if you like. When you finish a course or if you want to change course, it’s easy: the course bar on the bottom of the homepage will take you to a Course Overview. There you can “set” a course. Of course you can also start individual exercises straight from the Course Overview if you want to work on something in between.

Yes. The learning system is based on the idea that you choose a course at the beginning. You can however choose other learning materials and do other exercises that don't necessarily belong to your active course, "a la carte". Or you can simply "set" another course as active. Your homepage will always show you the next step according to the course you've set.

Yes. The course system makes a suggestion for you, but it’s always possible to learn something else. Since all the themes at Babbel are divided into small portions, you can always do an individual exercise without having to do the whole course. You can start any exercise directly from the course overview. Then you’ll come to the course bar on the homepage. However, in order to learn in the easiest and most effective way, we do recommend the courses that our language teachers have developed.

The entire vocabulary consists of 3000 words covering all the essentials, making for a complete, solid foundation for language proficiency. For every word there is an example sentence – including a translation – that shows you the word in context. So that you don’t have to learn everything at once.  We’ve also developed handy-sized courses on particular themes of interest.

There are beginner courses, where you will learn the basics of the new language. In numerous grammar units you’ll also find, along with conjugation exercises, important rules for how to put it all into use. Depending on which language you’re learning, there are also listening comprehension exercises or short 10-minute trainers.

Within these extensive offerings there is a lot for both beginners and continuing learners to discover, and even advanced learners will find engaging exercises that speak to their interests.

Your Personal Vocabulary and a sophisticated Review Manager

Words and phrases that you’ve worked on at Babbel go immediately into your Personal Babbel Vocabulary. This is connected to Babbel’s sophisticated Review Manager, which knows when you should best review them. It is intended to help you optimally reach your learning goals.

Learning that sticks
In order to really commit vocabulary to long-term memory, you need to practice it often and at appropriately spaced intervals. Based on the proven method "spaced repetition", the Review Manager reminds you to practice your vocab at certain times. The intervals are assessed individually for each word or phrase, based on how often you’ve reviewed it and how often you get it right.

Only correct answers move up
Every word or phrase in your Personal Vocabulary falls into one of six knowledge levels. Every time you get one right in review, it moves up a level. Likewise, when you get it wrong, it moves down.
This means words and phrases that come easily to you will end up at a higher level, and consequently will need to be reviewed less. Those you have a harder time with, on the other hand, will have to be reviewed more often until you truly commit them to memory.

Longer intervals after every review
For each level a word or phrase moves up, the longer the interval before it will need to be reviewed is. At the beginning – or after you’ve gotten a word wrong –, the interval is one day. On the second level up, it’s four days, then seven, then 14, and then 60 days. Once a word reaches the sixth level, it will be six months between reviews.

But here’s the good news: you don’t need to worry about how it all works! The Review Manager reminds you automatically to review, and knows exactly what vocabulary to present to you for optimal language learning success.

In the vocabulary trainer you learn individual words, and there will be example sentences to clarify it all.

As far as the order you learn vocabulary is concerned, first of all we present three new words to study with text, images and pronunciation. In the second part we test how well you’ve learned them: you’ll match all the words with their English translation. Afterwards, you’ll immediately have to type the word out. But don’t worry: we show you some letters as a hint. It’s also not a big deal if you have to cheat a little. What’s most important is that you’ve written out the new word yourself.
Finally, we’ll show you an example sentence for all the vocabulary words and their translations. You'll have to choose which of three new words fits in the sentence. Then come the next three words. At the end you see all six words again in an overview in order to make it all clear.

Yes. With Babbel you can learn set phrases for specific situations – for travel, for the restaurant, for shopping or going out. These types of trainers work entirely independently from vocabulary trainers; words and phrases are not mixed. So you can decide at any given time if you want to build up your vocabulary or if you would rather learn set phrases for specific situations. In some courses these two kinds of Trainers might be combined - but only when it makes sense to do so.

You’ll learn phrases with fun multimedia exercises.  First of all the phrase will be spoken aloud and shown to you. There will always be a corresponding image and English translation. Then you can test yourself to see if you can match the words with their translation. For the third step, we’ll show you the individual words, and you’ll have to build the sentence yourself. Then three more phrases come along. At the end you’ll play a little memory game to make your learning more practical.

Babbel offers many different kinds of exercises that are combined in our courses for optimal effect. There are vocabulary trainers with different kinds of exercises and sentence trainers in four different forms. These exercises are accordingly integrated with multi-leveled units so that you won’t see new content only once, but repeat it several times.

Then there is conjugation training, grammar exercises, listening comprehension units and writing exercises. All the different kinds of exercises use multimedia material together with the text. In contrast with learning systems that try to teach all different kinds of content using very few, uniform types of exercises, Babbel  presents a richly diverse programme of activities strategically designed for where you are in your learning process. This makes for learning techniques that are especially varied – and thereby effective.

All the content at Babbel is developed by our team of foreign language teachers and native speakers. Experienced language teaching experts design the exercises and content. In places, there is also content based on learning material we have licensed from renowned (print) publishers.
Afterwards the material is reviewed several times and optimized.

Our team's biggest job, however, is adapting often complex didactic material to make it understandable and interactive for online learning.

The basic and advanced vocabulary on Babbel contains around 3000 words and about the same number of example sentences. Every word has a corresponding image to help you memorize it. Our native speakers add their voices to the entire vocabulary along with all the phrases.

There are numerous conjugation exercises for regular and irregular verbs, as well as tutorials on grammar-related topics. Those who are just starting out will find grammar embedded in our integrated beginner courses.

All the words and phrases that you learned in the former version of Babbel are saved in your personal vocabulary. You can access them anytime using the refresher tool.