Duolingo vs. Babbel: Do You Need Free Fun or Structured Instruction?
Should you boost your learning with Duolingo or Babbel?
As an experienced language learner myself, I tried both of these apps out to save you the time and hassle.
In this review, I’ll compare Duolingo and Babbel, which I used to study German, and I’ll discuss their respective strengths and weaknesses.
Ultimately, Duolingo is a good fit for those who are dabbling in a new language and would like a bit of a foundation. Babbel, on the other hand, is a better fit for those who are a bit more serious, as it has more instruction.
Read on to get all the details!
Contents
- Key Takeaways
- What Is Duolingo?
- What It’s Like to Use Duolingo
- What Duolingo Does Well
- What Duolingo Could Do Better
- What Is Babbel?
- What It’s Like to Use Babbel
- What Babbel Does Well
- What Babbel Could Do Better
- Final Thoughts: Is Duolingo or Babbel Better for You?
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
Key Takeaways
While I did study German back in school, I decided to claim that I was a complete newcomer to the language to see how both of these apps would handle absolute beginners and learners of other levels. This is what I found:
- Duolingo is great for someone who is dabbling in the study of their new language. If you’d like to learn a few new foundational vocabulary words and language basics during your free time, this is the app for you.
- Babbel is a good option for someone who is serious about learning a bit more of their target language. There’s more structure and instruction, so you’ll be able to learn and say some basic phrases.
| Product | Features | Overall | Price | Buy Now |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Does Duolingo Work? See How Effective This Popular App Is in Our 2023 Review |
|
8.8/10 |
Duolingo vs. BabbelDuolingo vs. Rosetta StoneDuolingo vs. MemriseAfter DuolingoApps Like Duolingo | |
Babbel Review: Prestigious Program That Teaches the Basics But Doesn’t Grow with You |
|
7.8/10 |
Babbel vs. DuolingoBabbel vs. BusuuBabbel Alternatives |
If you’d like to find out about the differences in the app’s learning processes, keep reading!
What Is Duolingo?
A Quick Duolingo Review
Name: Duolingo
Description: An incredibly popular app that gamifies language learning.
Languages offered: Over 30 languages including Arabic, Chinese, English, Japanese, German, Italian, Korean, Spanish and more.
Offer price: Free, with a premium subscription for additional features starting at $6.99 per month
Summary
Duolingo is a free app that gamifies language learning and makes it fun with bite-sized, playful daily sessions. It won’t help you reach fluency in a language but it’ll get you started with effective practice of vocabulary and sentence structure.
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User friendliness - 10/10
10/10
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Delivers on promises - 8/10
8/10
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Authenticity - 7/10
7/10
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Value for price - 10/10
10/10
Pros
- Uses organized, progressive lessons
- Teaches sentence structure from the get-go
- Features game-like learning with interactive lessons, learning streaks, colorful graphics and more fun features
- Targets all the learning skills
Cons
- Doesn’t take you beyond beginner level in most languages
- Has no practical usable language practice (like conversational speaking)
- Some languages offer more content than others
- Lacks instruction on the reasons and nuances in grammar and language usage
Most language learners are aware of Duolingo, the lurking giant of language learning apps represented by its wide-eyed green owl mascot.
Duolingo operates on the freemium model. That means anyone with a device can download Duolingo, pick from one of 37 different languages for English speakers, and use it without having to pay a cent.
Duolingo’s learning revolves around quick mini-exercises. These exercises use your input to teach you vocabulary grouped by various categories.
For a fee of $6.99 per month, you have the option to upgrade to Super Duolingo. This version offers a few neat bonuses, such as quizzes, the ability to practice mistakes, unlimited retries and no ads.
Duolingo certainly embraces its reputation, lauding itself as “the world’s best way to learn a language” right in its website banner.
What It’s Like to Use Duolingo
As soon as you sign up for Duolingo, you’re asked what language you want to learn, your reasons for learning and how much daily study time you’d like to aim for. You also have the option to learn more than one language.
As I mentioned, for the purpose of this review, I chose German and I picked a preference of 10 minutes of study per day, which is classified as “regular.”
In Duolingo, each language has its own “tree” of individual modules, or categories, as you can see below.
For each category, there are five different levels (from 0-5, beginner to advanced). You move on to the next level after completing the lessons in your current level. Each lesson consists of about 12 exercises.
Higher levels in a given lesson have a very slight uptick in difficulty. This generally translates to the exercises being less hand-holdy, although the vocabulary is essentially unchanged.
I didn’t find myself feeling five times more challenged at the Level 5 marker, so I assume that those who are attentive to the exercises in lower levels will feel similarly.
For each category, Duolingo has a “Tips” section that explains a bit about how the language works. For example, one of the tips had a brief overview of German gendered articles.
The exercises primarily involve text and audio, with some supporting images. They may ask you to match pictures with words, translate vocabulary, listen to audio clips or complete phrases.
If you’re able to access your microphone, Duolingo can also provide speech recognition exercises (if you can’t or don’t wish to speak, however, then you can choose to skip them).
Your “lifespan” in Duolingo is dictated by a “hearts” system. Every time you make a mistake, you lose one heart. Losing all hearts requires you to backtrack and review the material, but your hearts will also refill every day. With Duolingo Plus, you get unlimited hearts, meaning no matter how many mistakes you make you can keep studying.
When you do make a mistake, Duolingo will automatically provide the correct answer. You can then forge ahead and continue with your exercises, with the chance that those words will pop up again throughout your session.
You can skip units by taking a short assessment exam. If your score is high enough, you can move forward to the following unit. However, you’ll need either a “lingot” (which are received sporadically during successful streaks) or have the Duolingo Plus version for unlimited retries.
After completing a lesson, you get a fun sparkly congratulations, a few rewards (experience points, potentially a lingot) and the ability to move forward to the next category. That’s right: You don’t have to complete all the levels of one category in order to move on to the next.
Of course, you can also stop to review some weak spots in a given module. Duolingo lets you review the words that gave you trouble during your studies. You’re encouraged to review old modules even as you blaze through new ones so that you don’t forget previously learned material.
What Duolingo Does Well
1. The game-like format makes for fun learning
It doesn’t feel like a chore to learn with Duolingo. Duolingo operates so much like a game that at times I forgot that I was actually learning a language.
I quite liked seeing immediate rewards for my successes, and the colorful presentation definitely added to my motivation. The app definitely makes a case for the appeal of game-based learning.
But while it’s easy to blaze through the exercises with nary a thought, Duolingo does well to remind you (without being overly obnoxious) that you could go further still by reviewing.
2. A simple but telling interface
Looking “pretty” isn’t necessarily the main priority of most educational resources, but it sure can help make learning more interesting!
Duolingo’s interface isn’t overly fancy but it is sleek and cozy. The language tree is compact and easy to navigate. In your exercises, your successes and mistakes are color-coded so it’s clear at a glance what you could use some additional help with.
One of my favorite little UI features is the module completion meter. It circles the module icon and gives you a visual representation of your progress. As a visual learner, I find this appeals to me more than just having a number percentage to detail how much I have left to learn.
3. No price tag, no worries
This is all under the umbrella that’s one of Duolingo’s greatest charms: It’s all free. Certainly, you can opt for Super Duolingo, but it’s hardly necessary if you’re using the app like most users would: casually and with a limited amount of time per day.
This also means it would be possible to gain knowledge of many languages from Duolingo without having to pay a single cent. And who can object to such freedom?
What Duolingo Could Do Better
1. Limited education on anything besides vocabulary
My biggest gripe is that Duolingo teaches vocabulary, but little else. Even though I was doing exercises with full sentences or phrases, there were virtually no grammar explanations and very little context given.
Basically, I felt as if I were learning German words in a vacuum, which doesn’t bode well if I ever wish to participate in an actual German-language conversation.
Interestingly, I was also a bit thrown off guard by the fact that, despite my claim to be a complete beginner to the German language, Duolingo chose to immediately test me on full and seemingly random German words such as coffee (Kaffee), milk (Milch), and (und) and please (bitte).
A few audio exercises of German letter pronunciations were tossed in, but they seemed a little out of place.
2. Exercises can quickly become repetitive
With extended use of Duolingo, I found myself becoming a bit disinterested in the exercises, mainly because I was just repeating and “learning” the same words over and over.
There didn’t seem to be a rigorous spaced interval system for word encounters, which means in a given lesson, you’ll be saying the same couple of words again and again in repeating formats.
I can only take being tested on the words mein Vater (my father) and meine Mutter (my mother) for so long before everything starts to become dull.
3. Rigid translations and strange sentences
Lastly, Duolingo’s choice of translation and sentences can be a bit…iffy. This is a well-known trait and often a point of amusement for users. Sometimes Duolingo can be touchy on how you translate sentences, as seen in this example below.
At the risk of sounding nit-picky, while Guten Tag can certainly mean “Good afternoon” in the right context, it can also simply mean “Good day” and be used as a general greeting during most of the day. However, Duolingo doesn’t seem to want to budge.
Here’s another example of a quirky sentence you likely wouldn’t say in real life.
This is probably Duolingo’s attempt to get you to train what you’ve previously learned, but by itself, it’s not incredibly functional (not shaming those who do enjoy greeting their cup of morning joe!).
What Is Babbel?
Overview
Name: Babbel
Description: The "world's first language learning app," based around 10-15 minute interactive lessons.
Languages offered: 14 languages, including Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Indonesian, Polish and English.
Offer price: Monthly subscription from $7.45/month up to a one-time fee of $349 for lifetime access
Summary
Babbel is a great app for anyone just starting a new language, with content that can provide a solid foundation for later learning. However, the app is limited in its scope, not offering much for intermediate and advanced learners, despite its promises to teach “language for life.”
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User friendliness - 9/10
9/10
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Delivers on promises - 8/10
8/10
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Authenticity - 8/10
8/10
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Value for price - 6/10
6/10
Pros
- Teaches applicable, useful conversational language
- Lessons build upon previous knowledge
- Includes language tips within lessons about grammar, formality, sentence structure, etc.
Cons
- Limited language choice, considering the age of the app
- Doesn’t offer much for intermediate or advanced learners
- Not enough variety in exercise format
- Lets users skip entire sections, which can be a problem when lessons build on previous lessons
Babbel actually started its run before Duolingo: The former was made available in 2008, while the latter was conceived in 2011.
Unlike Duolingo, you have to pay for a subscription in order to use Babbel. The pricing depends on your subscription, with the cheapest being $7.45 for 12 months, paid yearly.
In terms of format, Babbel operates similarly to Duolingo. It teaches you a language with short exercises that are separated into lessons. Babbel offers 14 languages, which is less than half of Duolingo’s offerings.
Despite this, Babbel still ranks highly among language learning apps and has thousands of active users.
What It’s Like to Use Babbel
Like with Duolingo, I also decided to try out Babbel’s German lessons as a complete beginner.
Babbel has beginner to intermediate level courses, as well as in-progress “independent” courses that serve as supplemental learning.
Each course has about 10 or more lessons that focus on a few vocabulary or grammar concepts, typically revolving around a certain scenario.
The courses follow each other in sequential order and you need to complete one to unlock the next one, which you can see here. 
The newcomer and beginner courses focus on the basic words and phrases you’d need for rudimentary conversation.
The intermediate course includes more scenarios and aims to improve your confidence with the vocabulary and grammar you learn.
The exercises aren’t too different from Duolingo’s. Babbel’s questions are largely of the fill-in-the-blank style, in which you must complete phrases with the right word, as in this example here.
Some require you to manually write out words or match vocabulary with the correct translation. All the exercises include both text and audio (provided by actual human speakers). If you make a mistake, you’re given the option to move on or try again.
Unlike Duolingo, Babbel’s lessons are interlaced with short grammar explanations. These brief but helpful interjections give you pointers on how to use certain vocabulary or manipulate sentence order.
While there’s an expected order to the lessons, you can skip around and take whichever ones you’d like. You can even skip ahead to the next course level.
Babbel also has a “Practice” section that focuses on review. You can do this with flashcards, listening, speaking or writing formats. There’s also the option to practice words with little games that, while very basic, are still pretty cute!
What Babbel Does Well
1. Offers more language tips
I immediately noticed that Babbel’s method of instruction is more involved than Duolingo’s. It offers more explanations and tips regarding how the German language actually works.
For example, this is how Babbel explains how to express regularity in German.
These explanations are interlaced with the actual exercises and are accompanied by questions that let you practice the concepts in question. Thereafter, Babbel makes sure you encounter them again.
While these little explanations are brief, they’re still very helpful for boosting your knowledge by even a smidge.
2. Sensible lesson plan
Learning with Babbel reminds me a lot of working with an actual German workbook. Babbel certainly isn’t as gamified as Duolingo and doesn’t flood you with rewards for successes, there’s a comfort in the consistency and structure of the lessons.
Duolingo feels a bit scattered to me in terms of its unit organization, likely because its curriculum is largely categorized by isolated topics. However, Babbel’s lessons are organized to build up your skills from the most basic to more involved phrases and sentences.
3. Helps build conversation skills
One of the features I appreciate most about Babbel is the inclusion of dialogue snippets in its exercises. These are narrated by actual speakers and give you a taste of the language in action, including the content you’ve just learned plus a few extra phrases to keep you on your toes.
Moreover, the conversation examples are realistic and genuinely applicable. You can easily imagine yourself partaking in the same back-and-forth with a real human.
What Babbel Could Do Better
1. Great for beginners, but lacking for advanced learners
For complete newcomers, Babbel can serve as a relatively thorough introduction to basic phrases. There’s enough material to keep beginners busy but, unfortunately, Babbel’s courses stop at the intermediate level.
This is a bit disappointing as the intermediate level is still relatively easy but appears to be teetering at the point of becoming more challenging. Advanced learners can probably use Babbel for the purpose of review, but they won’t find much to add to their existing knowledge.
2. Somewhat weak in promoting independent language use
While the avid learner can indeed glean some German conversation skills from Babbel, the software should more strongly encourage active language production.
This is a problem shared by many language learning apps whose exercises primarily rely on you choosing answers from provided options. Babbel does better than most by having decent exercises that require actually writing out words, though I think it can provide more to challenge users.
3. Exercises can get a little boring
While Duolingo’s exercises suffer from being overly repetitive in the content they test, Babbel’s exercises can end up feeling a bit too repetitive in format.
The most involved I personally felt was during the conversation exercises, mostly because I got to see the language being used more extensively both in audio and text. I wished there were more interactive exercises of that nature, rather than just clicking and writing the same few answers to the same kinds of questions.
This could also be amplified by the more simplistic nature of Babbel’s interface. While neat, it can feel a bit barebones, which can lessen the sense of engagement.
Final Thoughts: Is Duolingo or Babbel Better for You?
Duolingo works best for the hobbyist, the language-dabbler who is interested in a new language but not gung-ho about their studies. Because of its highly casual and somewhat minimalist approach to language teaching, Duolingo can make a new language approachable and introduce foundational vocabulary.
Babbel works best for more avid language learners who’d like to get a more applicable education. While there isn’t as much gamification in its format, Babbel’s lessons have more structure and instruction, organized so that you can speak and understand a number of basic phrases.
If you’d like more in-depth information on both, check out our full review of Duolingo and our full review of Babbel.
Beyond Babbel and Duolingo
Each software has its pros and cons, but ultimately, neither will do as a stand-alone learning resource. They both lack language instruction in context, which can put a big dent in the comprehensiveness and engagement of your studies.
The key to learning with Babbel or Duolingo is to put your learning into context. Watch YouTube videos, TV shows and movies in your target language and listen out for words and sentence structures that you recognize.
Both Duolingo and Babbel would do well paired with a program that puts the vocabulary and basic language you’re learning into an authentic context that provides support for learners.
On the language learning program FluentU, for example, you can see all the words you’ve learned in context and spoken naturally by native speakers.
While FluentU has courses, an effective way to use it is to learn with any video and any vocabulary that you want.
So one excellent way to use the program along with Duolingo or Babbel would be to add new words you’re learning to a FluentU flashcard deck, and then learn from the videos that FluentU finds for you that use those words.
At the end of the day, whether you choose to study with Duolingo or Babbel, the key will be to accompany your learning with plenty of context!
Ultimately, there’s no better determiner than feeling everything out first-hand.
I hope that my look at Babbel and Duolingo will give you an easier time choosing which language learning app is better for your learning style!
