Posted on March 28, 2019 by Lena Koester
Imagine two Babbel colleagues, freshly arrived in Berlin: Lucy is from the United States and Filip is from Poland. Both want to integrate to their new home by learning German. How is their learning experience different, and do their respective native languages play any role when learning German? Babbel language experts Elin and Anna shared their insights into how they take learners’ native languages into consideration when creating language courses.
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Posted on January 15, 2019 by Caroline Paboeuf
A passionate language learner and teacher, Caroline loves to experiment with languages and share her favorite methods for self-directed learners. She acquired English and German in school, Russian on her own in Moscow and is now learning Italian with Babbel, where she works as a Course Editor in our Didactics team. Having taught French abroad for three years, she was able to put her best practices to work in Babbel’s brand new French course for advanced learners. These nine “monolingual” lessons tackle the theme of French culture through badass slang expressions as well as subtler shades of meaning… And she had quite some fun scripting it!
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Posted on January 7, 2019 by Christina Gehlen
At Babbel, the Didactics team of more than 150 language learning experts is responsible for creating and optimizing our language courses. They decide on learning goals for each lesson, pick the best training methods to achieve these goals – and then plan, script and record the courses. That’s why they probably know the learning approach at the core of Babbel’s app better than anyone. And that’s why we asked them to reveal their favorite courses. We ended up with a list of some of Babbel’s coolest courses – which might inspire your next learning session but also show the time and effort that the Didactics team puts into each new lesson. Here comes our first editor’s pick: Swedish for Everyday Life, presented by Elin, project manager for Swedish and Norwegian.
Elin, tell me about your favorite course.
I picked Swedish for Everyday Life, a course that’s meant for anyone who has a little knowledge of Swedish already, and focuses on everyday situations. In the course, we follow the character Simon through a normal week: a friend’s birthday party, a dinner out in town and a visit to the police. It’s a mix of reviewing words and concepts that an upper beginner learner knows, and new vocabulary mixed with cultural information. You will, for example, learn how to ask for your clothing size while shopping or how to sing a popular Swedish Birthday song: Ja, må hon leva!
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Posted on October 15, 2018 by Joshua Stephens
Samuel works in Babbel’s Didactics team, designing and optimizing our English courses to deliver the most effective and engaging learning experience possible. With our most recent Advanced English course, the lessons get learners conversant in everything from gender identity, to gentrification and urbanism, to new workplace models. We sat down with him to talk about why fluency in these themes serves not just learning, but how we show up to the world.
I think, first, we should talk about: Why an English course in English? The logic of that may not be apparent at first glance.
Yeah sure! Language learning is all about talking, right? You see it’s pretty much agreed these days that the more exposure a learner gets to the language they’re learning, the faster and more effectively they’ll learn it. In a classroom setting it’s now normal that a language is taught almost exclusively in that language from the start. And it works. That’s what I learnt as an English teacher… and as someone who successfully scaled the formidable cliff-face of German as an adult with no prior familiarity. And as someone whose work and personal life are now largely conducted in German, I’m the proof in the pudding, so to speak.
But, of course, I always had a friendly teacher on hand to explain things when I didn’t have a clue what was going on. With Babbel Classic at beginner and intermediate level, we introduce new vocabulary and explain things in the learner’s native language to make sure there’s no confusion. For advanced learners this becomes unnecessary, as they should already have a solid enough knowledge of the language they’re learning to cope with simple instructions, guidance, etc. In fact, it’s important at this stage that the learner develops the ability to be able to work things out for themselves, as they would in real life, using the knowledge they already have in a given context to work out the meaning of longer texts, audio recordings, new phrases and sentence structures.
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Posted on August 15, 2018 by Annalise Nurme
Babbel’s VP of Product Design Scott Weiss is an industry leader in user experience. From learning machine code as a teen to writing the world’s first textbook on mobile user experience, Scott was at the forefront of product design years before the term was coined. Since joining Babbel two years ago, Scott leads two cross-functional teams of designers and engineers. As a mentor and champion of Babbel’s flat hierarchy, Scott’s accomplishments are best evidenced by the time and care he devotes to his quickly expanding teams.
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Posted on June 26, 2018 by Sara Grippo
Sara is an editor for Italian on our Didactics team at Babbel. Languages are a passion of hers, and she’s grown even more interested in them in recent years by moving to different countries. She’s learned German, Russian, English, Danish and French, and her current challenges are to learn Arabic and Turkish. In her latest course on Italy’s dialects (“Italian from North to South”), she shares her passion for Italian by inviting our learners on a language trip from the North to the South of the boot on the lookout for the regional peculiarities of Italian.
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Posted on March 5, 2018 by Sam Taylor
Samuel is the fresh-faced Editor and British-English ‘Besserwisser’ (know-it-all) on Babbel’s Didactics Team. In 20 years of continent hopping he has picked up an unhealthy smattering of French, German, Portuguese, Finnish, Czech, Croatian, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, Scottish, Kiwi and American English (lol). Here he writes about his latest project, which combines metaphor, idiom and colloquial language with (crackpot) British humour. The first of Babbel’s gripping new English narrative courses keeps learners on the edge of their seats while they discover how to converse like an English-language native. Tune in to the situational comedy series “Fowlmouth Farm” – an immersive course for advanced learners, taught almost entirely in English.
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Posted on January 18, 2018 by Chad Yuille
Babbel’s newest English course teaches in-demand skills like rapping and surfer slang… entirely in English! The monolingual “How To” course for advanced learners is available now!
Chad has been an editor on the Didactics team at Babbel for over three years and is the resident expert for all things American English. Having lived abroad for nearly 20 years, he speaks a bit of Spanish, Thai, Khmer, and, most recently, German. Here he writes about his latest project, and the maxim “give the people what they want.”
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Posted on December 21, 2017 by Benjamin Davies
Babbel’s partnership with Cambridge English brings language assessment into the digital age
Ben, originally from the UK, is project manager for English in Babbel’s Didactics team, the language experts who create and optimise our courses. In the past, he’s trained and worked as an English teacher and assessor in both Germany and Spain, and he delights in learning more unusual languages as far afield from English as possible, including Swahili and Tongan. Here, he writes about how Babbel and Cambridge English, experts in language assessment, partnered to release the Babbel English Test…
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Posted on March 7, 2017 by Lars
Lars works as a Russian course editor for Babbel. Having lived half of his life in Russia and half of his life in Germany, he understands and appreciates the endearing idiosyncracies of both cultures. Here, he gives us an insight into one of the many traditional celebrations in Russia.
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