January 15th, 2008
Babbel: Learn a new language with a rich Internet application
Babbel is launching today and it’s a rich Internet application built in Flex that is going to help you learn a new language. Like any site now there is a bit of a social twist. Users of the site can message back and forth and study together. Currently the site supports Spanish, French, Italian, German and English. You pick what language you’re interested in learning and then it walks you through a series of quizzes that get harder as you go along.
In playing with the demo account the past couple of days I found the interface to be a lot of fun to use. The content wasn’t always perfect and it was difficult to understand the words sometimes, but one of the goals of Babbel is to let their users contribute more content over time. They are also looking to add more collaboration features such as video/audio chat which would make it relatively easy to work remotely with a group to learn a new language.
All in all I think the site has a lot of promise. They make great use of rich Internet application technologies and it’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of RIAs and eLearning. As they add more in the way of collaboration I think it will be a great showcase for a next generation RIA. It might also be cool to have an AIR version down the road that would save your results locally and allow you to practice the lessons when you’re disconnected. I also have an interview with Thomas Holl, one of the founders about their use of Flash and plans for the future.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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