I took about 70 classes over a one-year unlimited class subscription with Babbel Live for Spanish from mid-2022 to 2023. My level was beginner to low intermediate over the course of the year, and I only took classes in the A1, A2, and B1 range. Prior to the classes, I was working with Anki flashcards and Duolingo lessons. What follows are some thoughts I had wrote down while taking the courses. Some aspects of the course may have changed since I took them.

For those who haven’t looked into Babbel Live, the classes are online and slides-based, with up to 6 students and a single instructor. You can book up to a few minutes in advance. They run for about 55 minutes.

Class Activities

The classes were all structured the same, which I found helpful, but repetitive – after a few classes, I began to recognize certain phrases that made the classes go smoother, and I knew what to expect. You could also view the slides in advance of the class. Each would have generic stock photos, and simple phrases or lessons that you could expect in a middle school class. They don’t feel intimidating, and the slide design the same across all classes. Rarely, teachers will take out their own learning materials and use those in place of the slides.

Each class is focused on a single subject – how to talk about vacations, or your family, or what you are doing. Depending on the class, they have a mix of new vocabulary, sentence matching to a photo, a simple conversation in a break-out room, a grammar exercise, or a list of question prompts.

Each class starts with a short introduction from each student (where you are from, why you are learning Spanish, and maybe an additional question or two). While this was repetitive, it did help me in my visa interview, as I had practiced explaining that my partner was moving to Mexico for work so many times by that point.

Depending on the teacher, the class may finish the slides early or not at all. Occasionally some teachers will ask the class to further describe what is in a picture or spend more time asking for vocabulary words on a topic. If the class finishes the slides early, the teacher might ask people what they are doing for the day after the class is over, or how everyone feels about what they learned.

At the Newcomer level, the classes were much more focused on vocabulary than grammar. It was difficult to tell frequently which class would be more focused on grammar. Even so, on the Newcomer level, the grammar exercises were never in-depth. For example, when learning to talk about vacations, we learned the past tense for the I, you, and we forms. The next exercise was to talk about each other’s vacations, which involved using the third person he and her tenses – which we didn’t go over in advance, which made it very confusing.

The classes could have done a better job incorporating cultural lessons on holidays, food, etc., that helped us learn about the countries we might travel to. And to some extent, the teachers will make up for this, telling us about their lives.

The courses are catalogued as Newcomer, Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. I struggled a bit with the jump from the Newcomer to Beginner level. From what I saw, Babbel didn’t give any guidance about when you are ready to move up a level at all. The lessons were structured the same. The key difference was that teachers spoke much quicker, used more advanced verb forms or domain-specific vocabulary, and expected that answers would come with reasons. The students still had a range of skill levels in these classes though. For the first few tries on the A2 level, I was the worst student.

The Teachers and the Students

The small-group experience was enjoyable. For the most part, I liked the people who showed up. Most of them were clearly committed to learning the language. It was almost all people from the United States or European countries. Most were learning Spanish either to talk to people they knew (friends or work colleagues), because they had a Spanish-speaking family member, or because they had an upcoming trip.

That said, in many Newcomer classes, you would encounter either a) a person who was much more advanced than everyone else, or b) a person who was a genuine newcomer to the language and had difficulty understanding or speaking at all. I only remember one or two classes where people were not engaged or simply difficult to work with. In these cases, the teachers handled those students very well, and it didn’t interfere with the class too much.

The Newcomer teachers were all excellent. Each teacher was engaging, encouraging, and helpful. All would take notes and share in the chat, either through screenshots or typing. There were differences in teaching styles, but those were limited to how many mistakes they corrected for each student, usually. For the most part, after every slide, they would stop and check if anyone had questions about the material. I wish I could reach out to some of the teachers for private lessons.

On the User Experience

Live was not well integrated with the rest of Babbel. Three small things first:

  • On my homepage, I would always see an ad asking me to sign up to Babbel live, even after I had purchased the subscription.

  • Secondly, the “My Activity” progress tracker doesn’t account for any Live classes either, which made it useless for me. These might not affect my learning, but they do increase my enjoyment of being on the platform – I would have liked to see how many hours I spent in class, or how many unique people I was in class with, for example.

  • Lastly, after the class, there was an option to give feedback about the class in a short survey. I took most of these to compliment the teachers and say thank you. The pop-up asking me to give feedback didn’t disappear even if I had already completed the survey, which was annoying. The placement quiz panel also never disappears, even after you take the placement quiz.

More significantly, the self-review exercises did not incorporate what I learned at all in the Live classes. The “Practice” tab didn’t include any vocabulary that I learned in the courses! And while the Live courses linked to exercises if you viewed the “Prepare for Class” or “Recap”, I would have much preferred to have the class vocabulary automatically added to a deck of flashcards, for example. Very often the self-study lessons that the Live classes link to aren’t at all related to what you learned in the class.

I really disliked the self-review exercises. Duolingo has a much better user interface on the desktop version that makes learning feel much smoother and more fun. The Courses on Babbel are also confusing to navigate through. You have an option for “My Level,” which was a very basic course that was onerous to get through. The “More Courses” tab didn’t really say anything about the level of the course, nor was it as tightly contained as Duolingo’s course selection is. Babbel’s self-exercises largely mimic Duolingo, but less intuitive and convenient.

My biggest UI/UX complaint was that I couldn’t set my time zone manually for the Babbel Live course listings. They depend on accessing the browser’s geolocation. When I traveled, or when I enabled a VPN, this completely changed the time zone of the classes. And nowhere on the site do they tell you the current time zone! Multiple times I booked courses in the wrong time zone and had to cancel. The Help chat has a specific question answering this, so I can’t be the only person to encounter this. When I reported this to the Support team, they directed me to a Babbel Wishboard. The link to this page did not work. I eventually added my feedback in after some back-and-forth, but my subscription ended before anything was ever implemented. I don’t know the status now.

Scheduling

The Babbel Live course selection had a wide-enough range, but limited timings for my schedule. I generally practiced every weekday at 8am, then on the weekends, two classes in the morning. After about a week and a half, I had trouble finding new classes at the right time at the Newcomer level. It seemed that usually there were 2-3 courses scheduled for each hour. Whether these courses had available room depending on when you were scheduling the course. Sundays, I think, were the busiest and had the most fully-booked courses. I generally booked my classes for the entire upcoming week on a weekend, and didn’t have trouble finding at 8am (ET) course for the most part.

Note that it did warn you that if you schedule and cancel with less than 24 hours notice, or miss a class, they may fine you. I never received any sort of penalty for missing a class or canceling.

One note is that the platform didn’t offer great filtering capabilities. I could look up by level, day of week, or time of day. I could also hide previously attended or fully booked classes. The time of day selection isn’t a specific hour, but parts of the day, e.g., 12pm to 5pm, or 9pm to 6am. This wasn’t really helpful, since it meant I still had to scroll across many irrelevant times to find the right spots. I would have also liked to filter by the class topic, or by whether it focused on a specific grammar exercise, or what conjugations or verbs were part of the class.

Summary

Overall, if you don’t have enough money to afford private classes, Babbel Live may be a good deal for you.

The classes can feel repetitive, and with up to 6 students, you may not get the personalized attention that you need to improve. A flexible schedule helps here, allowing you to target classes with very low participation. Using Babel Live as a supplement to private instruction may be helpful if you don’t have people to practice with.

Scheduling was not a problem, but filtering could be improved, and popular times could fill up quickly. The 55-minute instruction period was a good amount of time to fit into a workday, but partially taken up with introductions and repetitive opening exercises.

The Live courses were not integrated at all with the rest of Babbel and that was a very frustrating point for many users. Hopefully they have improved this in the past year.