The biggest difference between Babbel and Duolingo is the approach to language learning. Babbel is a better option if you want traditional language instructions through modules and lessons. By contrast, Duolingo works great if you need a playful, gamified experience.
You will most likely not become fluent with Babbel. It's a solid language app and can give you a strong foundation in your target language, but to achieve fluency, you'll need to use other resources. While it won't help you become fluent, Babbel can help you improve your language skills.
The main difference between Duolingo and Babbel is that while Babbel focuses on a more robust and traditional form of teaching a foreign language through comprehensive lessons, Duolingo tries to gamify your learning and offer a modern experience.
Content may be too basic for advanced speakers. Babbel has a limited amount of speaking exercises and feedback is not as thorough as competitors. Babbel does not offer live tutoring, which means users cannot speak with a live tutor to practice their language skills. Babbel offers a limited amount of free content.
Duolingo uses plenty of example sentences to help you learn words in context. And since words are frequently reused in different examples, you'll get to see how a word may be used in more than one context. Duolingo offers over 20 languages, so you'll have over twice as many language options as Babbel.
Duolingo has become the most popular language-learning app today, and for good reasons. The app offers game-like lessons to help you learn more than 35 different languages—all for free.
Registration with Babbel is completely free of charge and the first lesson in every course is free to try.
The Pricing Structure of Babbel
Babbel offers around 30%-50% discount off the total monthly price if you are subscribing for more than a month. For one month you need to pay $13.95. A subscription for three months will cost you $29.85 altogether whereas an annual subscription is priced at $83.40.
The Bottom Line. Babbel's language lessons take approximately 10 to 15 minutes each, so tackling a couple of lessons daily will put you on the right track toward language proficiency.
Duolingo. This free app is widely regarded as the best alternative to Babbel, and we agree. While there is a paid version of Duolingo that users can sign up for to access additional features, most find that the free version does a great job of teaching the ins and outs of a new language.
We have compiled a list of solutions that reviewers voted as the best overall alternatives and competitors to Duolingo, including Rosetta Stone, Busuu, Lingvist, and Mango Languages.
Busuu offers a language learning experience that compares to Duolingo. They have a structured curriculum that you can progress through involving audio, vocabulary, and other gamified experiences.
Create a manageable learning schedule
Set yourself a goal of completing 3-4 lessons per day, as this amount ensures you don't overwhelm your brain with too much information that you will struggle to remember! Each lesson takes about ten minutes to complete, so you can set aside less than an hour per day.
Each level takes between one and two months to complete. You can expect to be able to start speaking Italian after the first level and progress to a high level of fluency after around six months. Babbel Italian has a tracking feature that allows you to follow your progress as you go through the levels.
Services like Babbel help you learn a language through a series of online courses that include grammar lessons, contextual learning, and audible and written practice opportunities.
According to the research, the ideal amount of daily study time for rapid language learning is around 1 to 2 hours per day. This may seem like a small amount of time, but it's important to remember that quality is more important than quantity when it comes to language learning.
Babbel Live classes are only open to people who are 16 years old or above. Learners of this age can book classes via their own Babbel account, either independently or under your supervision.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
In Australia, 1 month of access to Babbel costs AU$19.99. A 3-month subscription to Babbel costs AU$14.99 per month.
Whether or not Babble is worth it is going to depend on what you are wanting and what your goals are. Babbel is not designed for those who have a large amount of experience speaking different languages already. It is designed simply and uses simple teaching methods that will not be able to match an expert's abilities.
Babbel subscriptions renew automatically. If you don't want to continue learning with Babbel, you should cancel your subscription before your next payment date. You can cancel anytime, up until the day before your subscription renews.
Babbel now gives its users the possibility to learn a language hands-free while cooking, driving or working out - something that was frequently requested. And it's already met with demand: Since their introduction, the podcasts have already seen more than a million downloads.
Best Overall: Duolingo and Memrise
It offers a full program of language learning material in more than 35 languages. It's sequential, meaning you work through the lessons more or less in order. For select languages, Duolingo has excellent podcasts and interactive stories for learners at an intermediate level.