Talk no longer always free at Babbel
Language learning site Babbel is gradually moving to a pay-for-learning model after initially offering free online language courses only.As I reported in September, 2008, Babbel.com launched free online language lessons during its beta test phase. Now, the site plans to start promote a premium, for-pay language learning service, as well as basic introductory lessons for free.
For the moment, Babbel offers 5 languages as both reference and learning languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian and German. The site boasts 284,472 users today.
Babbel is definitely just testing the waters with a few for-pay courses. While it will be offering a Spanish program designed for German speakers priced at a reasonable 19 euros (about 25 dollars) over three months, many services will remain free for the near future.
” Other aspects of the site are likely to remain free for a while, such as vocabulary trainers, writing exercises and all community features as live chat, message boards, internal mail,” reports TechCrunch.
In the meantime, if you don’t have time to master a foreign language for your professional or corporate needs, turn to a qualified language service provider.
Betty Carlson
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