Duolingo vs. Babbel
Learning whole new languages online has never been easier
LEARNING A NEW language as an adult can be a tricky proposition, especially if you live in a monoglot culture and don’t get the chance to practice.
Apps and services that promote language-learning can come in handy here, offering daily lessons to learn new vocabulary and reinforce old lessons, so that when you do get the chance to use your new language skills, they’re on the tip of your tongue.
Prominent among these services are Duolingo and Babbel. They’re both popular ways of learning another language, but each takes a rather different approach.
The first major difference is in pricing: Duolingo is free. Or at least a version of it is. The free software gets you full access to its lessons—and that’s it. If you want to remove ads, get offline access, make unlimited mistakes, and actually track your progress, you need to sign up for a Plus account. This costs $7 a month, and there’s a two-week free trial to see whether it’s right for you.
Babbel gives you a week’s free trial, but makes you sign up for a subscription plan before the trial starts, so you have to remember to cancel at the end of the seven days if you decide it’s not for you. There are two levels of subscription—a Babbel App sub, which gives you access to all the online streaming lessons (from $6.95 a month, if you sign up for a year), and Babbel Live, which gets you that plus access to live virtual classes (the cost depends on how many classes you attend).
The approach the two apps take toward learning a language is very different. As you can tell from the description of the subscription levels above, Babbel takes a traditional lesson-based approach, with modules and a logical structure, where basic vocabulary is taught first. Duolingo treats it as a game, with bitesized lessons that focus on real-life goals, and leaderboards that pit you against your friends in competitive language-learning, and is organized around “skills”—short units on a single subject, such as the weather, or your family.
This is the main differentiator that will send some learners to one app and others to the other: Do you learn best in a structured environment with a “teacher” figure? Or are you more likely to retain the information in a 10-minute session on the couch with a cartoon owl? Duolingo’s approach is actually a bit deeper than that. While the cartoon owl is a feature, there’s a method at work behind its unusual working practices. In a study carried out by Duolingo itself, the median amount of time Duolingo learners with no prior knowledge of a language took to reach “intermediate” level was half that of college students. (“Intermediate” is defined as reaching the fifth checkpoint in Duolingo, and the A2 proficiency level for college students.)
MIND-ALTERING EFFECTS
Now, obviously, research that’s been carried out by companies about themselves is always suspect, and “company says own product is good” should never be a headline, but if there’s a sniff of truth that using a free app is remotely as good as doing a college course, then really we should all be doing it. Research (proper research, this time) supports a link between
bilingualism and cognitive flexibility, plus increases in alertness, empathy, creativity, and originality. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the structure of a language affects its speakers’ world view, and therefore people’s perceptions are relative to their spoken language. So, change your language, and you literally change your mind.
That’s not helping us compare these two apps, though. Babbel’s interactive dialogues are based on realistic scenarios designed by linguists, with the idea that, if information is seen as relevant to the learner, it’s more likely to stick in the memory. Duolingo wants you to remember what you’ve been taught, too, so you’re frequently required to go over skills you’ve already mastered. Duolingo also motivates you to keep going with “streaks”— essentially, it tracks the number of days in a row you successfully hit your goals in the app—but the sentences it has you memorize are just as likely to be nonsense as they are useful, with few explanations about why it wants you to learn about snakes eating cakes, or taking your pants off—you may learn advanced words before you know the basics. Duolingo’s audio, too, sounds auto-generated and unnatural, whereas Babbel’s is more realistic.
Perhaps this is the reason Duolingo can offer lessons in 38 languages to Babbel’s 14. The hand-crafted approach may offer more realistic scenarios, but you never know when the Spanish for snake or pants will pop into your head just when you need it. Duolingo offers instant grading for all its lessons, while Babbel uses review sessions to check that you’re retaining the vocabulary.
As far as apps are concerned, Duolingo offers them for Windows, Android, and iOS, while Babbel offers them for Android and iOS only—both services can be used perfectly well through their respective web pages, however.
The differences between these language-learning services run deep, even though they help you work toward the same goal. It all comes down to how you like to learn, whether a formal teacher and classroom setup is more likely to impress the information into your mind than a videogame-like system that encourages you to chuckle at the nonsense it gets you to translate, and compete with your friends via leaderboards. Would you thrive in a calm, professional environment (Babbel), or do you prefer the instant feedback of bright colors and loud noises you get from Duolingo? That’s the kind of question that free trials were made for. –IAN EVENDEN