babbel

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Babbel is a community-based, online language-learning tool.

Designed by a team of software experts and language-instruction professionals at the Berlin-based company Lesson Nine, Babbel provides an intuitive approach to learning via cutting- edge applications, audio cues and user-generated visuals. It also enables users around the globe to connect with and learn from each other.

With courses in German, English, French, Italian and Spanish – and more languages slated for inclusion – Babbel blends social networking with vocabulary-developing and sentence-building tools. Babbel’s system manages the content for review until the material has been mastered; game-like multimedia “trainers” offer exercise applications that last about 2-5 minutes

Members of the Babbel community teach one another as Tandem Partners, messaging one another within the site and developing a study curriculum together. Now the site includes an innovative chat feature called the “Board”.

Developed as a Rich Internet Application (RIA) with Adobe’s Flex framework for Flash and Ruby on Rails, Babbel is operationally robust and highly intuitive.

Lesson Nine founders Thomas Holl and Toine Diepstraten have many years of application development, IT management, community cultivation and interactive media experience. The other two founders, Lorenz Heine, was a co-founder and CFO of Native Instruments, and has extensive entrepreneurial experience in the software industry, while Markus Witte has online marketing and management experience, and a solid academic grounding in language, cultural theory and media. Content Manager Ulrike Kerbstat holds Master’s degrees in language instruction and interpreting, and is fluent in German, English and French.

Milestones

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• 1/14/08 — Public Beta Launch

Products

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Babbel

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Sources

1. Babbel: Help Me, Help You Learn A New Language (techcrunch.com) [edit]