Over the years I’ve managed to pick up some Spanish vocabulary here and there. Sometimes it was from co-workers or from living or travelling in places where it was spoken often. I also have watched plenty of television programming with either Spanish subtitles or audio.
When I began travelling more for work, I wanted a better way to practice and expand my Spanish vocabulary and pronunciation. I downloaded about a dozen free apps onto my phone and used each of them as a way to drill and generate the repetition that helps me remember the words and their uses.
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The Babbel app was the one I liked the best, and the one that I had the best results with. I decided it was worth it to subscribe to a monthly package that offered access to even more courses. Here’s a screen from my tablet showing the progress I’ve made to date.
Four out of the 22 lessons in the Spanish Beginner’s Course 1 so far. One nice thing about how this works is that your progress synchronizes across multiple devices logged into your account. If I complete a lesson on my tablet today, and tomorrow I go to my phone to take the next lesson, it knows where to start. There is plenty of control to limit the use of cellular data if you are roaming, and only update when using WiFi.
You will be prompted if there are any updates to the courses and lessons you have downloaded. There is an option to download these in advance so you can learn while offline. This means the learning doesn’t have to stop while you are in a plane with no access to data services. If you are at home or somewhere with a data connection, there’s no need to download in advance, but my habit has always been to do so anyway.
