The flights are booked and the swimming trunks are packed, so now all that’s left to do before your holiday is to pray to the weather Gods for nothing but sunshine on your vacation, right? Well, what if we told you that you could also learn a significant amount of the local language before you fly?
If you’re the sort of traveler who wants to soak up some rays and a bit of culture, learning the language will allow you to escape the usual tourist traps and fully embrace the country you’re visiting. Equip yourself with the local language and venture out into the real world to immerse yourself in the country. Babbel transforms you from a tourist into a traveler by enabling you to start speaking a new language in just a matter of weeks. Don’t believe us? Here are 6 ways Babbel can get you talking before you fly:
1. We Teach You The Holiday Essentials You Need
Instead of frantically trying to learn some phrases as you leave the airplane, Babbel helps you master the essentials before you travel. Our in-house team of linguists have created purpose-built lessons for 14 languages which cover everything you need for your holiday.
No matter where you’re going or what you plan on doing, there are some fundamental aspects of a holiday that you’ll inevitably have to grapple with. Being able to order food and drinks in a restaurant, paying for your souvenirs in a shop, an asking for directions to the beach are all prime examples. We’ll teach you all of these and much more — and empower you to feel confident in your new language.
2. You Can Tailor Your Language-Learning Around Your Itinerary
We at Babbel have long prided ourselves on creating an app that helps you converse with locals in a wide variety of different scenarios. The app boasts lessons on diverse topics such as sports, going to concerts, colloquial slang, flirting at the bar, shopping at the flea market, or even mastering the art of small-talk. No matter what you do on your holiday, our app will have the right lesson to help you make the most of it.
3. We Teach You To Speak The Language As It’s Actually Spoken
The Babbel app fine-tunes your ears to pick up on the language as it is actually spoken, which means you’re less likely to stumble through simple phrases and butcher the pronunciation.
We know it’s not easy to master exotic new sounds. To assist you in your mastery, Babbel provides key vocabulary and phrases delivered by native speakers with a speech recognition tool. This feature focuses on building up your confidence in speaking the language by giving you immediate feedback on how accurate your pronunciation is. This means your first attempts to communicate with the taxi driver at arrivals won’t be your first attempts to speak the language, so you’re much more likely to be understood.
4. We Give You The Level You Want
With only a short time available before you fly, it’s vital that you concentrate your efforts on the most important areas. Our beginner courses quickly get complete novices up to speed on all of the fundamental aspects of their new language. The app does this by seamlessly weaving together all aspects of learning (reading, writing and speaking) to give you a full appreciation of the language from the get-go.
If you’re a more advanced learner who’s just looking to refresh the language before you fly, you can focus your learning time on our refresher lessons that are designed to jog your memory and awaken dormant language skills just in time for your holiday.
5. We Even Give You Handpicked Travel And Language Tips
To prove just how much better your holiday can be when you know a bit of the language, we teamed up with Tripadvisor — the travel planning and booking supremos — to create unique, practical lessons for people traveling to a whole host of international destinations.
Your time abroad is precious, so you don’t want to waste it by eating out at the wrong restaurant. Take Rome for example. It’s not difficult to find a pizza in the city, but in order to find the perfect pizza, you’ll need to butter up the locals for some sound advice. We take these things as seriously as you do, so if you’ve always dreamed of ordering a proper Quattro Formaggi from a rustic pizzeria in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood, then breath easy, because we’ll teach you how.
6. We’ve Tested It Ourselves And Have Been Verified By Experts
We believe it’s possible to learn enough of a language before your holiday so that you can start speaking it the minute you step off the plane. And to prove it, we’ve got two examples of how Babbel enabled complete beginners to start speaking a language they had never learned before, in a seriously short amount of time.
We challenged 15 Babbel employees who were complete beginners to learn as much Spanish as they could within 3 normal working weeks. And because we’re really mean, we forced them to fit their learning in and around their usual day jobs.
The results? With only an average of 2-3 hours of study each week, our participants were able to hold conversations in Spanish (with a genuine Spaniard) by the end of the 3 week period. En serio — this group o learners, who at the beginning of the challenge were unable to string a sentence together in Spanish, were, by the end of the challenge, able to successfully chat away with one of their Spanish colleagues. They were introducing themselves, explaining their upcoming holiday itineraries, and even making a couple of cheeky wisecracks about just how great they thought their Spanish skills were.
Meanwhile, an independent study by researchers at the City University of New York and the University of South Carolina evaluated the overall efficacy of Babbel Spanish courses by examining 391 randomly selected learners and their progress by the end of the study. What did they find? Complete beginners with no knowledge of Spanish needed on average only 15 hours of study in a two-month period to cover the requirements for one college semester of Spanish. Better yet: 95% of users surveyed said Babbel is “easy-to-use” and “helpful.”
No matter where you go or what you plans are, every true traveler knows that getting a grip of the pleasantries in the local language will make you stand out among the hordes tourists. We don’t just encourage you to learn the lingo in order to be a polite traveler, though. We know that learning the local language will open up doors for you on your holiday that would otherwise remain closed, if you stuck to the English-speaking confines of the hotel bar.