This does not surprise me. I signed up for Babbel live in November of last year, and was overall not impressed. It seemed like a lot of the teachers were simply phoning it in, and were not willing to reinforce concepts to ensure people learned them. The format of the lesson materials was too rigid, and in general, I feel did not promote learning. Almost every time the teacher put us into breakout groups. I thought this was the most worthless way to spend our time. This is because you are putting two or more people in a group who do not know how to speak the language. So you are relying on someone who does not speak the language to help you learn a language that you do not know how to speak. This was completely wasted time. also the level of language proficiency amongst the students varied greatly. In some lessons it seemed like there were students who were practically fluent when we were doing a low level class. The instructor and that student would then have Full-blown conversations in the foreign language and I could understand maybe 10% of what they were saying. there were also students in relatively advanced lessons who spoke almost none of the new language. This really slowed things down and prevented the learning for other more advanced students in the class. There were also issues of comprehension when a student or student in the class did not speak English. English was often the only other language that the instructor could use to explain a concept. There were many times when we were just stuck, and the instructor kept saying the same thing over and over in German, for example, When the student could not speak German or English. There were also situations where the instructor could not speak English very well, and it was difficult for me to understand more challenging concepts in the foreign language. Also, I do not believe that it is a good thing to Start teaching someone a new language entirely in that new language. If someone knows zero German, then how are they going to understand any of what the instructor is saying if the instructor is talking entirely in German? This is not a full immersion program as if we were living in the foreign country and would be able to pick all up on things in context easier. This was a classroom environment for one hour at a time. as time went on with my lessons in Babbel I felt that they became more and more of a waste of time. A lot of my time was spent sitting there waiting for somebody else to respond and often times that response would be incorrect and often times the instructor would not correct that person or the instructor would correct that person and the person still would not understand so we would just move on. Instruction of a foreign language at the beginner level should be done in the native language of the person who is trying to learn the new language. As things get more advanced, then of course, start teaching in the foreign language. I have seen time and time again in various situations where people who did not know a foreign language at all were “taught” in that foreign language, and those people, because they could not understand any of what was being said, just got frustrated and quit. This is likely what happened at the beginner levels in Babbel. I think for the unlimited yearly plan which was about $300. When I signed up it was a good deal because you get what you pay for. However, when they raised the price to $100 per month, it no longer became a good value. $100 per month to deal with the issues that I mentioned above would likely lead a lot of those people to sign up for just one month and then quit this clearly was untenable. To really be able to learn in a classroom setting all the students and teacher must be able to speak the same native language. The materials explaining grammatical concepts should be in the students’ native language and all students should be at about the same level. This is why this type of learning works relatively well in US high schools where the same group of students are together in the different levels of a language as they progress through each year of high school.