Babbel has a well rated product line on multiple platforms, consisting of multiple ways to learn the basics of multiple languages at an affordable price. Already available on Windows 8, the company has just launched a number of apps for Windows Phone, further expanding the reach to consumers across multiple Microsoft platforms. So what can we expect to see in these official offerings?
Windows Phone owners will be able to take advantage of eleven languages Babbel will be introducing, with the apps (yes, plural) now available in the "Education" section of the Windows Phone Store. If you're yet to use the service, whether it be on the web or other platforms, Babbel makes use of repetition, visual cues, spelling exercises and effective voice recognition to help the user further develop an understanding of a particular language.
What's more is there are digestible lessons for those who only have a handful of minutes to spare on language development. Baby steps, folks. It's set to be a rich experience, but how much will the apps set consumers back? Nothing. Babbel has released the Windows Phone apps for free. If you've been considering learning another language before travelling, look no further.
So which languges are supported? Currently there are eleven separate apps covering each of the following: Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portugese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. It's quite the collection of popular languages.
The Windows Phone apps are said to be mainly vocabulary trainers with 3,000 words broken down into themed lessons. It's believed the apps will supplement a user's learning on a main desktop platform, but available for free we can't grumble that there's now an incentive to get into the swing of things before traveling abroad to a new location.
You can download the app from the Windows Phone Store (QR codes, from left to right): Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portugese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
via: Engadget
Reader comments
Babbel launches Windows Phone 8 apps to help consumers learn multiple languages
3 things
1) amazing UI and flow
2) hopefully added support for more languages like Tagalog, Mandarin, Lithuainian, Farsi, Japanese, etc
3) whenever the app is interrupted, say a lock screen or a phone call, the lesson becomes frozen and progress is set back to 1 for that particular portion.
I hope these issues are addressed but the apps are amazing for a 1.0 release. I'm downloading all except for Spanish since I can speak it fluently.
For those interested in becoming multilingual, these apps are definitely a must have.
Thai please
No Chinese?! Really?!
All those languages feature a European flag but then Portuguese gets stuck with the Brazilian flag. What the hell is up with that?
Whenever English or Spanish languages are featured they go with the flag representing the country of origin. You don't see an Australian flag representing English, or Mexican flag for Spanish. But Portugal almost always gets shafted.
Seriously it's really not a big deal.
Are we really going to fill the entire comments section with whining about a new app not supporting a defunct version of the OS? What is the app like? Does it serve it's purpose, and could it be improved, if so how? I think a language learning app is quite exciting for WP, especially if it is worth using.
I really wanted to learn Portuguese and French. But not gonna happen on my Radar :(
Yaaay!... ehh, wait... Can't find it... ohh right, WP8 ¬¬
Yes, odd that the article never really specified what platform, just "windows phone" which lead me to believe it was on 7.x and 8. This needs to be clarified more, simple add "8" after "windows phone" would do the trick.
let me know when Korean is in the list. ^_^
Do to learn English you need to know French, but to learn French you need to know English!
Go for German! That is a very fun language.
Das stimmt! :)
Nein!
EXCELLENT NEWS!!! I've been using their Windows 8 app on my desktop and Surface to learn German and LOVE IT. Best Language app out there. So glad they made a WP8 app so I can now learn everywhere. Thank you Babbel! Vielen Dank!
This is pretty dope! Learning Italian now
Where's the Japanese?
Not sure when people will get over this "What about WP7.8" thing....
Then honestly, they should have completely abandoned WP7. Whether expectations were realistic or not, they should have never left the door open for this. Just my opinion.
That doesn't make sense and it wouldn't silence that vocal minority. They would be even more hell bent if they were completely "abandoned"
Because it makes more sense to have apps and features released that can't be used on 7.5/7.8 phones? And I'm not saying I agree with that. Just that it seems alot of bellyaching would have been saved just by setting 8 as the reboot and going from there.
And yes, people would have been upset at that as well.
That's easy. When they upgrade to WP8+. Which is another 8 months minimum for many of us.
One thing they could really do is to provide a more obvious mechanism to quickly know which platforms are supported (WPCentral might indicate that, too). Reading a whole article, scanning a code, going to the store, looking for the "Install" button until you notice the dark gray text on black background that this one's not for you... are you surprised people are ticked off by that point?
Agreed
I would say that is WPC's doing. You can't find the apps that are not for your phone just by searching. Someone has to give you a link. In this case, that person is WPC. They could say "filed under: WP8 or WP7, News". Or if it runs on both, "filed under: WP7, WP8, review".
Finally a complete language learning app..
But where is the British language app... I need to learn British.
So what about WP7.8? What's going on here? So these can't run on earlier WP handsets? Ridiculous! Getting frustrated with lack of support for earlier handsets. I suppose those with WP8 handsets will have the same problem when WP9 is released lol
Hey now no need to jinx us... Also, promises were made...
Not at all. Companies find it much easier to port to 8 with c++ rather than c# which WP7 mainly uses. A company needs a certain roi and with WP8 the I is much smaller. So WP7 is rightfully dead, for the most part.
WP8 phones will get WP9.
Yeah, this isn't that robot that Google owns, this is Windows
Pretty much large apps are those. Great to see them coming