If you can't get enough of the English-language Weblogs, Inc. blogs, you can always check out some of the ones we serve up in other languages -- Autoblog Chinese or Engadget Spanish, for example. What? You don't know any other languages? Well, it's time you learned.
Babbel is a well-designed Web site designed to teach you a foreign language. It's part instruction, part wiki, and part social (isn't everything these days? What's next? A social network for wood stork enthusiasts? But we digress). Babbel incorporates a few different methods to facilitate learning one of the five languages they offer: Spanish, French, Italian, English, and German.
Once registered (it's free), users select sets of words categorized by what they have in common -- examples of modules include words grouped by emotions, family, appearance, and food.
Each word is accompanied by a photo and an audio clip with the correct pronunciation. As you work your way through the vocabulary, various tests check your progress and help reinforce new words, phrases, and sentences. As you learn words, they're collected and tracked in a spreadsheet environment for easy review.
Online language-learning services aren't new, but Babbel tries to set itself apart from the pack with its collaborative approach to populating the vocabulary lists. Users are encouraged to upload photos that correspond to the words lists and let other users vote on their relevance.
Babbel adds a social element to the site by allowing users to buddy up with other members to tackle learning a new language together, or to provide support to someone learning your native tongue. Message boards and a people search help you locate members to chat with and, as a nice added touch, there's even a toolbar that lets you add the correct characters in text fields as you type.
As a new site, Babbel is not without issues. Parts of the site didn't load properly (or at all) for us, and some of the vocabulary sections are still a bit sparse. Overall though, this looks like a site that has a lot of potential and we'll be very interested to see how it's doing a year from now.
Go on. Learn a new language, you know you want to. Besides, you don't want to end up like this guy.
Danke.
