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Planning for business travel is a lot more involved than booking flights and packing your laptop — you also need to prepare yourself for optimal communication with partners, colleagues and locals. Recently, I was in Florida and was surprised by how many people spoke Spanish. Now, I know that figure is nearly a quarter of their population.
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With an upcoming trip to Quebec on my calendar, and knowing that almost everyone there knows at least a little French, I decided to take the time to study some of the language beforehand. I tested out Babbel and this was my experience.
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The first few steps in my language-learning journey
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The reason I decided on a Babbel in the first place was that I’d heard so much about this particular app online and through friends. Trying to find free language resources wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, and I didn’t want to commit to expensive, in-person courses.
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Babbel also made it easy to set up realistic goals. Becoming fluent in French before my upcoming trip didn’t feel like a realistic goal, but now that I have a lifetime subscription, I may want to learn other languages in the future or brush up on my French. I selected my reason for learning, my desired proficiency and my target deadline, then the app set a weekly goal for me.
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Study a broad range of topics, useful for travel and beyond
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In just the first course, I’ve already learned how to greet people and say goodbye, introduce myself, share where I’m from and which languages I speak, order at restaurants and ask how much something costs, talk about my profession and say my age and ask for contact details.
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Babbel does a great job in explaining the informal and formal differences between different pronouns and terms. For instance, I already know that I should address clients and those I don’t know with “Bonjour!” and my familiar colleagues with “Salut!”
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Hands-on practice for real-world situations
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Each lesson also prompts me to practice my pronunciation, usually after seeing and hearing a new term. This remedies a common concern with learning a language through an app — Babbel calls it speech-recognition technology.
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While the software will let you know if you completely mispronounce a word, it’s not foolproof. One of my favourite features is that it motivates you to actually say the words out loud because that’s what you’ll be doing in the real world.
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There is also an entire course titled “Listening and Speaking” where you can sharpen more of those conversational skills. After taking a few lessons, these tend to focus on vowels and consonants.
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Review sessions built for long-term goals
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A big concern I had, with my Quebec trip still being quite a few months out, is that I would forget a lot of what I learned if I started now. But that’s no real reason to put aside language-learning goals and the app had a way of accounting for this.