It’s called learning to “speak” a language, but the sad truth is, few self-directed learners get up the courage to actually open their mouths. Lack of speaking practice can lead to shying away from having interactions with real people, which certainly doesn’t help with the final goal of communication.

The idea of our new integrated speech recognition tool, however, is to get learners talking. By prompting the learner to say the words out loud and test their own pronunciation, Babbel now has covered all the bases for truly effective  foreign language learning: reading, writing, listening comprehension and speaking.

Some traditional e-learning software includes this sort of tool, but none of them do it online in quite the same way. We have built a tool that performs speech recognition in real-time without requiring a custom browser plugin. The technology is complex, but using it is easy. For some backgrounds, check out the interview with Technical Director Thomas Holl.

To try out the speech recognition tool, just log into Babbel.com, set up the audio in 2 quick steps, and start any vocabulary package or beginner’s course. If you don’t have a user account yet, you can register for free and take one trial lesson. Speak up!

]]> http://blog.babbel.com/practice-your-pronunciation-new-speech-recognition-tool/feed/ 4 http://blog.babbel.com/revamped-italian-course-on-babbel/ http://blog.babbel.com/revamped-italian-course-on-babbel/#comments Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:31:22 +0000 Babbel http://blog.babbel.com/?p=1134 Image by jonrawlinson

With the release of  new features last week you’re seeing a lot of new technology, but what about the actual language learning material, you ask? After developing some new grammar courses for German and French and adding two entire new languages (Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish) in March, we’ve now created our first course in a new, streamlined format. All 34 lessons in our Beginner’s Italian Course are now available for learners whose first language is English, German, French or Spanish.  Starting with simple words and phrases like ciao and come stai, you’ll learn regular verb endings, pronunciation, numbers and a lot more. The final lessons cover more complex topics like travel, shopping and the city of Rome. Nine review steps help you to recap what you’ve  learned and commit it to long term memory. More updated courses for other languages – and for more advanced learners – to follow. Stay tuned.

Go directly to the course (after free sign-up).

]]> http://blog.babbel.com/revamped-italian-course-on-babbel/feed/ 0 http://blog.babbel.com/manage-your-babbel-vocabulary/ http://blog.babbel.com/manage-your-babbel-vocabulary/#comments Fri, 16 Apr 2010 12:41:23 +0000 Babbel http://blog.babbel.com/?p=1071 One of the things that makes Babbel unique has always been its high degree of personalization: Babbel’s features keep track and tailor themselves to each learner’s individual progress.

All the words and phrases you’ve ever studied on Babbel are added to your personal Vocabulary. Then, by encouraging you to review items at optimal intervals, a sophisticated Review Manager further helps you to commit vocabulary to long-term memory. It tracks your successes and errors, and calculates what is best to review, when. This innovative system not only makes learning close to effortless, but also makes it a lot more efficient.

We’ve revamped the My Vocabulary overview to make it even clearer. Due to popular demand, we’ve also made it possible to print out your vocabulary words. Go take a look here after you’ve logged into Babbel.

We at Babbel think  that in order to make progress in learning, it’s important to stay present with the language. That means, instead of straining to slog through long lessons, it can actually be more efficient to review with short, bite-sized units — as long as they’re consistent and evenly spaced.

With this in mind, we’ve innovated Babbel Refresh, an application that you download and run locally on your computer. It individually calculates optimal intervals between sessions,  chooses words and phrases from your Personal Vocabulary that are due to review, and gently reminds you to engage with the language you are studying. It’s a great tool for staying motivated!

Download Babbel Refresh here.

Yesterday we released Babbel Mobile — iPhone Apps for seven languages. We’re happy to be receiving positive feedback from all over the world. In fact, in some countries, we’re already ranking in the top ten educational Apps in the App Store!

The idea of Babbel Mobile is to allow you to study languages anywhere, anytime. We think it’s a great way to make some productive use of your in-between time — whether it’s on the way to work, on the commercial break or on the beach. You don’t even need an internet connection. But if you do happen to be online, everything you learn is consistently synchronized with your Babbel Review Manager, making the time you spend learning efficient.

Babbel Mobile can be used to complement Babbel.com or as a stand-alone vocabulary trainer. Babbel subscribers can access the full vocabulary of 3000 words, while others can try a free lesson and purchase vocabulary for a onetime price of  €5.99 / US$ 7.99. In any case, downloading the App is free for everyone. You can use your existing Babbel login or sign up cost-free in a few seconds.

Here are some links to the App Store for learning the following languages: German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish.

We are excited to announce that with some new features and software clients,  we have just made a leap toward becoming a language learning system unlike any other.

Babbel has never been just a website, but was rather built as a server client application. It’s no wonder, then, that we’d develop new platforms. Our objective has always been to make learning as simple, accessible and effective as possible using today’s state-of-the-art methods and technologies.

We’ve created Babbel Mobile, an iPhone app that can be used alone or as a complement to Babbel.com. You can now refresh your vocabulary anywhere and anytime, whether or not you’re on the internet. Then, with Babbel Refresh, the new desktop application for PC and Mac, you’ll always remember to review. Thirdly, a new list-view of your Personal Vocabulary also makes it simple to print out a vocabulary list, to remove words from the Refresher system or to get a full overview of your learning progress. And finally, we’re presenting a first Course in our new format: a new Italian Beginner’s Course is easier and clearer than ever.

Over the next days, we’ll cover all these new features in more detail. For now, just take a look at our new 30 second video above or here (in any or all of our seven languages).

What do Brazil and Sweden have in common?

We’ve figured out that Portuguese and Swedish are two of the foreign languages that learners worldwide are most longing to study. So, today, we are launching new, full Courses in Swedish and Brazilian Portuguese. This makes seven languages in all at Babbel. As promised, Babbel continues to expand and improve, always adding new features and opportunities for learning in innovative ways. This is just one of the recent steps.

To celebrate the addition of these two new languages, we’ve also got a special coming up: Language Flex, the chance to dabble in all seven languages for less than what it costs to do just one.  This means you can explore different languages according to whim, switch back and forth as much or whenever you like.

There might have been more than a few raised eyebrows last November when we at  Babbel decided to move away from our known Freemium model. We were forging into unknown territory; we got a lot of feedback saying that it was “daring”, “dangerous”.  But now the verdict is in – the switch to a pay service has been a resounding success. The change has brought in a committed cadre of learners happy with Babbel’s usability, efficiency and overall quality. It shows that our concept works.

The financial crisis has left Babbel unscathed, while at the same time the tense state of the job market has motivated more and more people to take their further education and career preparation into their own hands. It seems that Babbel has zeroed in on one of the select services on the internet that users value enough to pay for. Just in the first few months of 2010, over 80,000 new users have registered.

The largest percentage of users is made up of Spanish speakers, and the preferred learning language across the board is English. Surprisingly enough, the most active Babbel users are 35-45 years old, a bit older than the typical internet user. Meanwhile, it’s apparent to Babbel that there is an increasing interest all over Western Europe – especially in Spain and France – in improving foreign language skills. So on the roster this year are new languages, more courses and an effort to broaden visibility in Western Europe.

Our plan, in fact, was to partially finance Babbel with advertising. We intended to provide a “freemium” product that would have a basic version that was public, while providing additional premium content for those who might want to dig deeper. But now we see this just doesn’t work. It simply is not possible to build a high-quality online learning environment while simultaneously selling ad space effectively.We tried to bring these two objectives together. But ultimately we had to accept that a business model appropriate for social networks and news services is plain wrong when applied to online education.

Babbel is now one of the first online services to decisively abandon this antiquated idea of “free”. We certainly still want to make the world – or at least the internet – a better place, but we no longer think that we can do so using online advertising. In this (admittedly epic) blog post I’d like to give some background about our decision and some words on some related, internet-wide changes.

Free as in “Free Sharing” or as in “Freebie”?

The internet does provide a number of highly valuable things for free. Software such as the Linux operating system or the Mozilla browser belongs to this category, as well as some online encyclopedias and communities. It’s wonderful how many useful things you can find online that are absolutely free. This is thanks to a combination of internet technology, on the one hand, and the selfless dedication and idealism of a great number of people all over the planet on the other.

But beyond these truly free services, there are a great number of websites, as well as search engines, free mail, and a good portion of online dictionaries and social networks, that are sponsored by ads. In contrast to Open Source software and Creative Commons, where developers and authors often work for free, ad-sponsored services are designed to make money – and they do.

What’s Wrong with Ads?

Of course, making money is not necessarily a bad thing. But ads can have drawbacks for users of these sites, some of which are obvious and some of which are not so apparent.

The most striking downside of advertising is the ads themselves. They have to attract attention, so they are flashy. They are constantly evolving to keep us from becoming immune to them. The objective is consistently to draw our attention away from other things like news or blog posts and to make us read, click and interact with more ad content and, ultimately, buy a product. Advertising’s main strategy is interruption. And interruption is what we at Babbel are trying to avoid.

Yet another aspect of online ads is that they don’t have to get everybody’s attention. They can focus on a specific target group. So besides making ads more attractive, promoters and engineers are working to “target” them to those who are most likely to respond (i.e. to buy). To do this, user data has to be collected, processed, and analyzed. This data analysis doesn’t harm people per se, but more and more internet users want to protect their privacy and are justifiably feeling uneasy about it. I must admit I feel a bit uneasy myself when I see how much it is possible to know about the users of your website when their personal data is what you’re after.

But there is another, more insidious, drawback of ad-sponsoring that is less visible to the naked eye: the true customers of these ad-sponsored services are not the users but rather the advertisers. And as everywhere else, the Customer is King. This means that these services are not optimized for the best use-value but for the best click-rates and advertising revenue. Of course, users need to be brought back to the website somehow in order to see the ads and to click on them… but that is just a means to another end.

Strictly Commercial

These downsides of ad-sponsoring are especially problematic in a learning application. If we want to build a new kind of learning environment that really works, we simply cannot let the learner’s attention consistently get drawn away. We don’t want to spend our engineering resources on ad targetting, but rather on improving the Refresher and Recommendation systems. Most of all, we need our customer to be the learner.

Our idea is to create a new kind of online learning system that adjusts itself to the needs of the learner and makes it easy to comprehend new subject matter without too much effort. This has yet to be done successfully, and we have no real role model we can emulate or by whom we can “be inspired”. It’s pioneering work, and it requires expertise to be constantly rethought and redone.

To significantly improve our service and to approach that user-centered learning environment we’re dreaming of, we’ve put together an extensive team of professionals from different disciplines. Software developers and internet specialists work side by side with more than 20 teachers and language experts. Simultaneously, we are striving to make this complex application easy to use and more or less imperceptible behind the content.

So yes, Babbel 2.0 is commercial. This means that we want to – and have to – make a living from of it. We’ve got some financing and loans, but ultimately, we have to pay our own bills. And it seems that advertising is the wrong way to do this.

Because we deliver Babbel over the internet and don’t have so many variable costs per user, we can keep the price relatively low. Instead of charging more than a hundred Euros per product, as many learning software companies do, Babbel goes for a price of €4.95 to €8.95 per month. That’s affordable for anyone who wants to learn a new language. Also, we make it a point to have fair conditions. There are no hidden costs or implicit commitments. Users can cancel their membership at any time without any unpleasant surprises.

Internet Beyond the Advertising Industry: Will this be Web 3.0?

It’s clear that we are breaking a taboo. Many internet users think that all online services should be free. A lot of them will be angered by our change in strategy. But we’re convinced this will be the best way. As a matter of fact, we think it brings with it a lot of exciting opportunities.

As the internet plays an increasingly important role in all our lives, unreliable quality becomes more and more of an issue. If we use the internet for our basic everyday needs, we can’t afford to waste time comparing and verifying information and stitching together our own services. We need quality delivered steadily and without distraction. Again, this is especially true for online education.

This is why paid services have a great future. The demand for high-quality services and providers who don’t monetize user data is rising. After the huge wave of ad-sponsored “Web 2.0″ websites, these new business models might be the core of what could be “Web 3.0.”

Paid services are particularly advantageous for small providers and start-ups because you don’t need to reach a “critical mass”. You can survive on the subscriptions of your customers, even if you have a comparably small niche market. That’s why this potential Web 3.0 could be more diverse – and less monopolistic – than what we see now. Babbel 2.0 is one step in that direction. We hope that many users take that step with us.

Babbel is changing – for the better. With the just-announced funding of one million Euros from the EU’s European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the State of Berlin, we have plans to expand  through 2011 in technology and content. This means new and improved vocabulary packages, Beginners’ Courses, grammar lessons and an even better learning experience. The funds will be complemented by 200,000 Euros of our own.

In contrast with various other online learning platforms, Babbel.com is completely ad-free. The idea is to keep up the quality of the content with an eye to Babbel.com’s 500,000+ users, and not to advertisers. Not exceptionally in the world of young internet companies, up until now our earnings have been significantly less than our expenses. With the help of venture capital and the appeal of a completely revamped platform, we’re looking toward a unique and exciting new future for language learning on the internet.