Babbel gets less attention than Duolingo and deserves more. It’s built by linguists, organised as a real course, and aimed at practical conversation rather than points. If you want structure — a path from A1 upward with someone competent deciding the order — it’s among the best options available.
But structure has a shape, and that shape leaves a specific gap.
A lesson covers a topic. A verb covers a thousand sentences.
Course-based apps are organised by situation: ordering food, booking a hotel, talking about your weekend. That’s a sensible way to build a syllabus and it front-loads the phrases you’ll use on a trip.
The catch is that a situation-based lesson teaches verbs incidentally. You meet pedir because it turns up in the restaurant unit, in the forms that unit happens to need. You may not meet it again for weeks, and when you do it’ll be in a different tense with no particular reason to connect the two.
Verbs don’t organise themselves by situation. They organise themselves by pattern — stem changes, irregular families, how each tense is formed. Those patterns transfer everywhere, which is exactly what makes them worth drilling directly. Learn how -ir stem-changing verbs behave and you’ve unlocked dozens of verbs at once, in every situation, not just the one in the lesson.
That’s the trade. A course gives you coverage in a sensible order. It doesn’t hand you the verb system as a system.
Finishing a lesson isn’t the same as recalling it later
The second gap is timing.
A lesson teaches a form, drills it while it’s fresh, and moves on. Review arrives when the curriculum schedules it — by position in the course, not by whether you personally are about to forget that particular verb.
Spaced repetition inverts that. Every item is tracked individually against your own performance and resurfaces at the point where you’re on the edge of losing it, which is where retrieval does the most to strengthen memory. Verbs you’ve got fade back. Verbs you keep fumbling come round more often.
For a body of material as large and as unevenly difficult as a language’s verb system, that difference compounds. Some verbs stick after two encounters. Others fight you for months. A fixed curriculum has to treat them roughly alike.
What VerbPal does instead
VerbPal isn’t a course and doesn’t pretend to be. It’s a focused tool for one skill:
- SM-2 spaced repetition on every verb individually, scheduling reviews from your actual performance
- Timed recall — sixty-second rounds that train retrieval speed, because a conversation doesn’t wait while you conjugate
- Conjugation inside real sentences, one tense at a time, so forms are learned with meaning attached and similar endings don’t blur together
- Ten languages on one consistent method — Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian and English
No dialogues, no culture notes, no syllabus. Verbs.
Which one, then?
Babbel if you want a structured path and someone else deciding what comes next, especially in your first months. Structure is genuinely valuable and the course is a good one.
VerbPal if you’ve done the lessons and the verbs still aren’t automatic. If you can follow a dialogue in the app but freeze producing one yourself. If you’re strong on set phrases and lost the moment the conversation leaves the script.
Both, realistically. A course for direction, focused drilling for the skill that decides whether you can speak. Ten minutes of verb practice alongside a lesson plan is a different experience from the lesson plan alone — and it’s usually the missing half for people who’ve been studying a while and can’t work out why speaking is still so hard.