Babbel Welcomes Russian as the 14th Language in Its Portfolio
Babbel, the online service for language learning, now offers courses in Russian – the first language with non-latin characters to be added to the company’s portfolio. Russian’s cyrillic alphabet is often the first big hurdle for beginners . Babbel solves this issue with the help of a transliteration table and thematically incorporates the entire cyrillic alphabet into a new Russian beginner’s course. Everyday speaking situations like greetings or visiting a restaurant give users a knowledge of Russian they can start using instantly.
Russian is the seventh most common language spoken worldwide, with 275 million speakers. It is no surprise then, that Russian is high on the list of Babbel’s most-requested languages. In order to satisfy these requests, the Babbel team began preparing and implementing the Russian beginner’s course months before its release. The linguists, native speakers and product designers at Babbel faced several problems however: How does one learn the cyrillic alphabet on a latin keyboard? And how can these new letters be conveyed so that they can be used immediately in the context of a conversation?
Barbara Baisi, Project Manager for Russian at Babbel, says, “It was very important to us to convey the 33 characters of the cyrillic alphabet in context so that users immediately practice first words and entire phrases that they can use in daily speaking situations. We were beta testing until the last stages of the course design in order to be sure that learning would be easy and motivating even with a latin keyboard.” The problem of writing with a latin keyboard is solved with the help of a transliteration table. Certain latin letters or letter combinations represent cyrillic characters in Russian (e.g. a = a, n = н and ya= я). Users of the Babbel app have it even easier – they will be shown a cyrillic keyboard on their smartphone or tablet.
When learning Russian, one can quickly see some commonalities with the Germanic languages. Even if the latin and cyrillic alphabets at first seem completely different, six letters resemble each other in both languages (A, E, K, M, O, T). Some Russian words were taken directly from English and vice versa: “tundra” and “mammoth” are just as familiar in English as “computer” and “lounge” are in Russian. Fortunately, Russian does not present some of the difficulties of the German language, such as the articles “der,” “die” and “das”.
About Babbel
Driven by the purpose of creating mutual understanding through language, Babbel has been building digital language learning products for consumers and businesses since 2007. The Babbel app helps people connect and communicate across cultures, whether for travel, friendship, or career advancement. Based on a deep knowledge of how we learn languages, Babbel aims to make learners conversational as fast as possible. And it works: Studies from institutions like Michigan State University, Yale University and the City University of New York demonstrate the efficacy of Babbel's language learning methods. Millions of language learners agree.
Babbel's secret sauce is the blend of true expertise, understanding of how humans learn, and the latest technology. Starting with one of 60,000 lessons across 15 languages hand-crafted by experts, the learner experience constantly adapts through behavior analysis to provide high quality interactive content that makes understanding a new language easy, from Spanish to Indonesian.
Because Babbel is for everyone, its team reflects this diversity. Across headquarters in Berlin and New York, a team from more than 80 nationalities represent the backgrounds and perspectives that make humans unique. With over 25 million subscriptions sold and an industry-leading retention rate, Babbel creates genuine connections with learners worldwide. For more information, visit www.babbel.com or download the apps in the App Store or Play Store.
