Is Babbel Good for Speaking English?

Babbel is a course. People ask if it is "good for speaking" because the course includes dialogues, and dialogues look like conversation. Sometimes they are the closest a learner has come to speaking all month. That is worth taking seriously. It is also worth seeing where a dialogue ends.

This is not a tour of Babbel's subscription screen. Those screens change. It is a review of the kind of work a structured dialogue course asks you to do, and a way to use that work so your own sentences start to appear.

What you are practicing in a dialogue lesson

A typical course lesson, Babbel included, does some of these things in one sitting:

• It shows you a short exchange in a situation: a café, a delay, a neighbor, a small problem at work.
• It explains a pattern in plain language, which many game-like apps refuse to do.
• It asks you to rebuild lines, type them, or say them.
• It brings the same words back later, so they are not strangers.

That is good teaching for recognition and for a pocket of useful phrases. Saying the line "Could I get this to go?" out loud is speaking in a narrow sense. Your mouth made the sounds of a sentence a course writer needed you to know.

The narrowness shows up the moment the waiter does not follow the script. He asks where you are from. He does not hear the first noun. He offers something that was not in the lesson. Now you need a sentence the course did not store. Learners often describe this as "I understand the lesson and I still cannot talk." Both halves of that sentence can be true.

Where Babbel-style courses are strong

Use this kind of course, and stay with it, if these are your actual problems:

• You want grammar notes written for adults, not a pile of examples you are supposed to induce alone.
• You like a path. Unit 4 comes after unit 3, and you do not want to design the path yourself.
• You are building the phrases of ordinary life and you are willing to drill them.
• You read well and you want the course to force a little speaking and listening into the same hour.

Babbel has a reputation for being more "classroom" than Duolingo: fewer cartoons, more dialogue, more explanation. That reputation matches the shape of the product even when individual features move around. If you hate explanation and you only want a game, you will be bored, and boredom matters because you will quit. If you hated school grammar and still do not know why "since" and "for" differ, an adult explanation is a kindness.

For a wider set of course apps, see apps like Duolingo. For the game-shaped end of that spectrum, see does Duolingo make you fluent?.

Where the speaking stays thin

A dialogue course runs out when:

• You can perform the café scene and you cannot describe your own weekend.
• You memorize lines. In the real conversation you wait to hear the cue that unlocks the line, and the cue never comes.
• The only English you say is English the screen just showed you.
• You finish the review session with a pleasant feeling and you could not tell a friend what opinion you expressed.

None of that means you should delete the course. It means the course is not the whole practice.

How to use a dialogue, then throw the script away

Do the lesson. Then spend eight extra minutes. This is the part that turns Babbel, or any similar course, into speaking practice.

1. Pick one line you just learned. Say it once, exactly, so the sounds are in your mouth.
2. Close the app.
3. Change one detail so the line is now about you. If the line was "I'm here for three nights," yours might be "I'm in this city for work until Friday."
4. Add a reason. "The workshop starts tomorrow and I did not want a morning train."
5. Ask the question the other person might ask next, and answer it. "Is it your first time here?" "No. I came once for a conference and I got lost in the station."
6. Record steps 3 to 5. Listen once. Repeat only the sentence that fell apart.

You have now done two different exercises. The course gave you a correct pattern. You used the pattern to say something true. The second exercise is the one people skip, and it is the one that shows up at dinner.

Here is a full example, from a restaurant lesson to a real preference:

Course line: I'd like the chicken, please. Your version: I'll have the soup. I don't eat meat on weekdays. Follow-up you invent: "Any allergies?" "No. I just want something light. I ate a lot at lunch."

Say it to a wall, or say it inside a scene. FluencyPal's restaurant role play is one place to discover that the waiter will not stay on your script. Any patient person is another.

Who should pay for a course, and who should switch the main hour

Pay for a dialogue course if you still want units, explanations, and phrases for situations you have not lived yet. Do the eight-minute transfer after each lesson or you will collect phrases the way people collect gym memberships.

Move the main hour to open speaking if you already finish the dialogues without much trouble and you still go quiet with people. At that point more units feel like progress and do not touch the fear. A speaking session — a call where you explain your actual lunch — is the next unit, even if no course numbers it.

FluencyPal can host that hour: a live call, a voice message you may redo, or a daily lesson that ends in two or three minutes of you talking. It will not replace Babbel's grammar articles or its sequence of beginner dialogues. If you want both, use the course as the pattern and FluencyPal, or a voice memo, as the transfer. The free FluencyPal plan has a limited number of speaking messages. Paid Practice access is one payment with no auto-renew. Amounts are on the pricing page.

A fair test after ten lessons

Do not ask "how many lessons did I finish?" Ask:

• Can I change the dialogue so it is about yesterday?
• Can I survive one question that was not in the lesson?
• Can I say the new line without looking?

If the answers are no, do not buy a second course. Do the transfer exercise on lessons you already have. If the answers are yes, the course did its job. Keep it for new situations, and spend more of the week in unscripted talk. Best apps to practice speaking English is the buying guide for that second half.

More guides

• Busuu review
• Rosetta Stone review
• Duolingo alternatives for speaking

About this guide

FluencyPal publishes this article, and FluencyPal is one of the tools it describes. There is no star rating here, and no invented price for another company. Lesson lists and prices change. Read the product's own page before you pay. Judge a tool by the action it asks for in fifteen minutes: tap, listen, read, or speak.