Babbel\u00c2\u00a0is a subscription-based\u00c2\u00a0language learning app\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0e-learning\u00c2\u00a0platform, available in various languages since January 2008.<\/p>\n
Fourteen languages are currently offered: Dutch,\u00c2\u00a0Danish,\u00c2\u00a0English,\u00c2\u00a0French,\u00c2\u00a0German,\u00c2\u00a0Indonesian,\u00c2\u00a0Italian,\u00c2\u00a0Norwegian,\u00c2\u00a0Polish,\u00c2\u00a0Brazilian Portuguese,\u00c2\u00a0Russian,\u00c2\u00a0Swedish,\u00c2\u00a0Spanish\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0Turkish.<\/p>\n
Babbel is operated by Lesson Nine GmbH in\u00c2\u00a0Berlin,\u00c2\u00a0Germany. Babbel has around 450 full-time employees and freelancers. The company is based in the\u00c2\u00a0Berlin\u00c2\u00a0neighborhood of\u00c2\u00a0Mitte.<\/p>\n
The company was founded in August 2007 by Markus Witte and Thomas Holl.\u00c2\u00a0In January 2008, the language learning platform went online with community features as a free beta version.\u00c2\u00a0In 2008, Kizoo Technology Ventures and IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH became Babbel’s first investors. Then, in 2009, Babbel was granted roughly one million euros by the\u00c2\u00a0ERDF European Structural Fund.\u00c2\u00a0The new product version, Babbel 2.0, went online in November 2009. At that time Babbel’s founders decided against an advertising and mixed-finance model (freemium), opting for paid content.<\/p>\n
In March 2013, Babbel acquired\u00c2\u00a0San Francisco\u00c2\u00a0startup PlaySay Inc. to expand into the\u00c2\u00a0United States.\u00c2\u00a0As part of the acquisition, PlaySay Founder and CEO Ryan Meinzer joined Babbel as a strategic advisor for its US operations.<\/p>\n
Babbel is a premium,\u00c2\u00a0subscription-based language learning app for web,\u00c2\u00a0iOS\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0Android. Babbel currently offers 14 different languages from seven display languages (German,\u00c2\u00a0English\u00c2\u00a0(US + UK),\u00c2\u00a0French,\u00c2\u00a0Spanish,\u00c2\u00a0Brazilian Portuguese,\u00c2\u00a0Italian\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0Swedish).\u00c2\u00a0Babbel’s original learning content is developed in-house by a team of over 100 educators and linguists.<\/p>\n
There are beginner, intermediate and grammar courses,\u00c2\u00a0vocabulary\u00c2\u00a0lessons, as well as courses with\u00c2\u00a0tongue-twisters,\u00c2\u00a0idioms,\u00c2\u00a0colloquialisms, and sayings. Courses for a given language may be aimed at a specific audience: for instance, English may be learned as “PR\u00c2\u00a0English” or “Marketing English.”<\/p>\n
In August 2017, Babbel announced that it had partnered with\u00c2\u00a0Cambridge English Language Assessment\u00c2\u00a0to create a low-cost online English test.\u00c2\u00a0The test assesses beginning and intermediate students’ reading and listening skills (up to level B1 and above of the\u00c2\u00a0Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). Every test features about 70 questions from a bank of hundreds of options which\u00e2\u20ac\u201dlike Babbel’s lesson content\u00e2\u20ac\u201dreflect real-life communicative situations,\u00c2\u00a0including recordings of radio broadcasts and conversations for listening tasks.<\/p>\n
Juliet Wilson, director of assessment at Cambridge English, explained to Professionals in International Education News that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153…until now it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been difficult for [online learners] to know whether they are really learning the right skills, or to demonstrate their real level,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d going on to say that the Babbel English Test would \u00e2\u20ac\u0153give learners reliable evidence of their progress and a certificate of achievement that demonstrates what they have learned.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
The word\u00c2\u00a0Babbel\u00c2\u00a0is the\u00c2\u00a0imperative mood\u00c2\u00a0of\u00c2\u00a0babbeln, which means to\u00c2\u00a0chat\u00c2\u00a0in the\u00c2\u00a0Hessian dialect\u00c2\u00a0of\u00c2\u00a0(in German)<\/span>. It is also a pun on the biblical\u00c2\u00a0Tower of Babel\u00e2\u20ac\u201da gigantic\u00c2\u00a0ziggurat\u00c2\u00a0whose construction was interrupted when the worker’ languages were made mutually unintelligible by God. The same motif was used in naming the\u00c2\u00a0Babel fish\u00c2\u00a0from Douglas Adams’s\u00c2\u00a0Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a symbiotic fish that serves as a universal translator. Babbel is also a\u00c2\u00a0homophone\u00c2\u00a0of the English verb “babble.”<\/p>\n Babbel’s content marketing arm publishes a\u00c2\u00a0digital magazine\u00c2\u00a0with written and video content in seven different languages. The topics range from behind-the-scenes looks at how Babbel lessons are created to profiles of Babbel customers and language learning tips from the company’s didactics team. In November 2016, Babbel launched a television ad campaign in the\u00c2\u00a0UK\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0Europe.\u00c2\u00a0Two television spots were created by the advertising agency\u00c2\u00a0Wieden+Kennedy. Sophie Bodoh, Creative Director at\u00c2\u00a0Wieden+Kennedy\u00c2\u00a0commented, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Everyone has different motivations for learning a language, but we recognized one common truth that applies to every new learner: They have some kind of fantasy about what it will be like to speak a new language confidently. Using the familiar cinematic worlds of different countries, we show Babbel customers playing out their own unique language-speaking fantasies.\u00e2\u20ac\u0153<\/p>\n The above is a brief about Babbel. Watch this space for more updates on the latest trends in Technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Babbel\u00c2\u00a0is a subscription-based\u00c2\u00a0language learning app\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0e-learning\u00c2\u00a0platform,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1426,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[477,842,7],"tags":[478,843,18],"class_list":["post-1424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-babbel","category-learning-application","category-techtrends","tag-babbel","tag-learning-application","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1424"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1425,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions\/1425"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.amt.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}