Yabla is a language immersion tool that helps you learn a new language through video content.
It’s a fun way for intermediate and advanced learners to improve their skills in their target language. It’s especially good for boosting your listening skills.
You don’t just watch the videos, you also learn from them by playing games that feature the videos’ content.
This is a review of the web version of Yabla. An iPhone app is also available.
For Whom is Yabla?
For the language learner who wants to learn a language by watching and learning from interesting video content.
More specifically, it’s for intermediate and advanced learners who want to take their language learning to the next level.
Yabla does have beginner videos, but it’s essentially a tool for the intermediate and advanced learner.
Additionally, the lack of structure in the presentation of material does not make it a great fit for the beginner learner.
Yabla is meant as an input tool. There are no speech exercises.
And as with any language learning product, Yabla isn’t a complete language learning solution. You have to see it more like a good tool to help you advance where basic language courses stop.
What Languages can You Learn With Yabla?
With Yabla you can learn:
- Spanish
- French
- German
- Italian
- Chinese (Mandarin)
- English
Check out the graph below to find out how much content Yabla has for each language:
Not Just for English Speakers
A good Yabla feature is that you can change all translations to a selection of other languages. For example: you can learn Spanish through English, French and German translations. The only problem is that some features, like vocabulary review, are restricted when you don’t use English for the translations.
A Great Library
Yabla’s video library is extensive, and there is always an interesting new video waiting for you.
I love the way how you can watch complete television series you like, and learn from them at the same time.
The desire to find out what happens in the next episode really adds to the motivation to keep learning. It seems to take away the feeling of studying. Really cool.
I hope they add more TV series in the future as not all of Yabla’s languages have that many.
The TV series are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the scope of Yabla’s content. There’s much more.
The videos are sorted by difficulty — beginner to advanced — and by category.
Here are the categories:
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Action Animation Art/Culture Comedy Commercial Demo Documentary Drama Economy/Business Environment Food History Interviews Leisure |
Lessons Music Musicians News People Science Society Sports Student Life Travel World Yabla Info |
Not Just for Children
What I find very refreshing is the lack of political correctness in Yabla’s video library.
Many language learning products and services keep their material innocent and boring. Of course, that’s good for the little ones among us, but it makes it somewhat dry for us, adults.
If we’re gonna learn a language through videos, we want interesting ones — not infant stuff!
Luckily, Yabla has enough spice in its videos to keep us interested. Heck, some videos even warn you with red letters: Viewer Discretion Advised!
All this doesn’t mean that Yabla doesn’t have any content for children.
In fact, in Spanish and Italian, they even have full series of animated children’s programming.
And if you buy a Yabla subscription for your kids, you can use their content filter and have only family-friendly videos show up. The strictest filter is stronger than the standards of the average television station.
Still, technology-savvy kids might be able to simply turn the filter off.
Yabla’s Core
The video player is where most of the action’s at.
The videos are split in small continuing segments, so you can easily work with the sentence that gives you the most difficulty.
As with any real-life content, it is sometimes hard to hear what’s being said. The audio quality isn’t always on a consistent level either.
Fortunately, you can loop a segment indefinitely by clicking the loop button. And if you feel it all goes too fast for you, you can use the Slow button.
This Slow button makes everything play twice as slow so you can better decipher what’s being said. It works surprisingly well.
But there’s more help:
Subtitles are available in your target language and the language you use to translate.
You can hide the subtitles individually, so you can watch with:
- No subtitles
- Subtitles in your target language only
- Subtitles in your native language (or English) only
- Subtitles in both languages
When you click on a word it immediately gets looked up in Yabla´s integrated dictionaries. And not only that, you also automatically send it one of your flashcard decks.
The Games
The games aren’t really that playful but generally they’re pretty good.
In Multiple Choice, a clip is played while the subtitles have one missing word. You have to use your ears to find it and then select it from multiple choice options. What I really like is that with each round you play, different words are chosen. That way, you can really squeeze everything out of a video there’s to learn.
Fill in the Blank is essentially the same game, but this time you have to type the missing word. No multiple choice options here.
Scribe
In Scribe you have to really use your ears.
Here you must type entire sentences you hear in the video. Fortunately, as with the other games, you have the Slow and Replay buttons at your disposal.
Both work well.
I’m especially surprised at the slow button. Usually when language apps have slow buttons the audio quality of the slowed audio suffers significantly. I don’t find this to be the case with Yabla.
Scribe has a lot of potential to improve your listening skills in a foreign language…and I’m not the only one who thinks that. Someone who went from 0 to C1(level) French in a year used Yabla’s Scribe, among other tools, to achieve this.
Scribe knows what sentence you’re struggling with. After each sentence you get rated by one to three stars. One star means you were struggling and three stars mean you were perfect.
This is personalized learning because you can really focus in on the hard sentences or sets. If do this, you can’t help but improve.
Not all Yabla’s games are great, though.
Because while Scribe is excellent, Vocabulary Review is a somewhat disappointing tool that does not feature video content.
It’s a boring and basic flashcard game.
I guess it gets the job done if you only want to review words from a certain video, but Yabla should do better here.
Your Flashcard Decks
The disappointment of the Vocabulary Review game gets made up by Yabla’s custom flashcard tool.
What’s so cool about it is that if you send a word to your flashcards, you also automatically send the video segment in which the word appears. In other words: when presented a flashcard, you can also watch the corresponding part of the video in which the word is said.
The video segment also reminds you of the story of the video, so that’s super in-context learning for you.
There’s no real integrated spaced repetition with the flashcards, but each word has a bar underneath it indicating how well you’ve studied a word.
Still, it seems that there are no reminders to review the words. For a scatterbrain like me, that means I forget about the words completely. ;.)
Overall, I really like Yabla’s flashcards. However, I do have some small complains:
- You can’t seem to add phrases or idioms to the flashcards
- Each deck has a maximum of 21 flashcards. When full, a new deck is automatically created. You can’t seem to manually change the words in a deck, at least not in a convenient way.
- One video seemed to corrupt a flashcard deck temporarily. I couldn’t watch the video segments anymore until I exited the deck completely. It happened every time a video segment from that particular video was played in a flashcard deck. It didn’t happen with any other videos I tried.
How Much Does Yabla Cost?
Yabla costs $12.95/month, but you can get a discount by signing up for multiple months at a time.
Especially the Annual plan offers an interesting discount of $55.
A Yabla subscription only gives you access to one language of your choice. With Yabla’s competitor FluentU, you’ll still have access to all their languages, but their plans are more expensive.
A Yabla subscription includes a 14-day no-questions-asked money back guarantee.
If you’re interested in Yabla but not yet sure if it’s worth the monthly investment, check out some free demo videos below:
Note: If you click on the Flashcards link in the main menu, you can also test drive Yabla’s flashcard tool.
Yabla Alternatives
FluentU
Yabla’s main competitor is FluentU.
FluentU has a more intelligent learning system, and the FluentU team seems to be more proactive about improving their app.
However, Yabla’s video library is much more engaging. Their TV series are a strong motivating force that can help you learn a language.
If you want to know more about FluentU, check out my FluentU review here.
I’ve also compared FluentU to Yabla.
CaptionPop
CaptionPop is a free Yabla alternative.
It works with any YouTube video that has subtitles.
But because it is free, it doesn’t have a real learning system.
It’s basically just videos with subtitles. (You *can* save video segments for later study, and you *can* slow down the speed of the videos)
Still, if you just need to watch subtitled videos in your target language…or you can’t learn your target language with either Yabla or FluentU…CaptionPop may be for you.
Wrapping it up
I had a good time reviewing Yabla.
It offers an entertaining way to further master a language.
Yabla is definitely a respectable rival to FluentU.
And just like its competitor, it’s a nice, modern, language learning tool. Services like these take a lot of the hassle out of learning a language through video content.
Pros
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Cons
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Yeah well, not a single mention as to when this was written. Writing this in june 2017, and curious about whether Yabla is worth it or not, I have no way of knowing whether the above was written four years or four weeks ago. Maybe the site’s been dead for the last several years. The missing date of publication makes an otherwise well-written article next to worthless for the readers it was intended for in the first place.
That’s a good point, Andy. Thanks!
The review was posted on March 6, 2017. NOTE: I updated the review November 19, 2018.
I think it’s worth it, but not as a complete language learning tool. But then again, no one tool is. You’re always going to need several sources to learn from, whether free or paid.
I actually had a bit of fun with it, especially with the TV series….
I have used Yabla French in and off for a few years and I really like the concept, though I’m starting to find the French videos at least seem quite dated. There’s few video segments which are very recent. There’s an eclectic collection of videos and some pretty offbeat and are mostly interesting enough to watch.
Thanks, Aidan.
I suppose that has to do with rights. Somewhat older videos are probably cheaper (or free) for them to use.
They’ve been adding videos, though. They’ve added more than three hours of new French videos since I wrote this review. Which divided into many short videos is quite a bit of content to learn from.
How do you use Yabla? Do you have some kind of study structure? Or is it a more random approach?
Thanks for your comment,
Noel
I have skyrocketed my French thanks to a 15-30 minute dose of Yabla when I can. I have a blast learning about culture, philosophy and food: their videos are so different and entertaining! I find myself no longer needing subtitles and literally speaking without much effort compared to when I began. The best!
Thanks for sharing your experiences with Yabla, Don!
I agree that it’s a cool tool. Some other language learning platforms can get boring, but Yabla generally doesn’t.
This is an interesting review, thanks. I just signed up for Yabla…one month at a time. What TV series would you recommend that Yabla includes?
Thank you, Suzanne.
For Spanish I thought the series called “Confidencial” is quite charming and entertaining.
Having said that, I think the best way to find good series is to check them out yourself.
Some of the series might not impress you at first, but if you give them a chance you’ll see that most of them are actually quite entertaining and interesting.
Though they may not be the blockbuster type of series you see in the US, I love them and they add a continuous story element to the learning experience.
I like the Argentine telenovelas
I certainly enjoyed your well-thought-out review (although I agree with Andy Smith that it’s important to date the reviews.) I’d be interested to know who besides FluentU are Yabla’s main competitors, and how they stack up (since I’m likely to subscribe to only one.)
And, as nothing more than a point of curiosity, do you remember an “audio-magazine” from a few years ago named Champs-Elysees? It was a cassette tape and a little lesson booklet (scripts, glossary, and a quiz.) I wonder if that morphed its way in Yabla or one of the others.
Not sure, Bob.
But I did compare Yabla to FluentU in this post:
https://www.smartlanguagelearner.com/fluentu-vs-yabla/
It was not easy to write the post as I honestly like both. Overall I think FluentU is a more complete product (it also keeps improving), but Yabla has better content and IMO is more entertaining to work with.
Good review. Is it still true that you can only sign up for one language on Yabla?
Yep, still true.
However, they offer some kind of a one-time rebate for people purchasing subscriptions for multiple languages. The only caveat is that the subscriptions must be for at least 6 months.
If interested, drop them an email.
Thanks for your review, I agree with it. I really enjoy Yabla. I have been learning Spanish for 2-3 years and use it as you suggest as part of a multi-pronged approach, including in-person courses, reading books in Spanish, other online courses, etc. One thing you didn’t mention which has impressed me a lot is that the Yabla personnel will readily respond to questions. There is a comments section on each video, and I have found if you ask a pertinent question the Yabla folks will typically respond, for example a usage question or cultural question. I also think the price is extremely reasonable, $55 for 6 months access for example (writing this in Aug 2019). If you had a tutor that would buy you about 2 hours if you were lucky. Plus it’s just kind of fun – I like the games and collecting “points”. The scribe game is excellent, basically old-school style dictation but can get hints, and it really forces you to listen. Again it is not a magic bullet to make you fluent, but is a good tool. It works ok on an iPhone but I use it mainly on a laptop.
Hi Jeremy,
Great comment, thank you.
Yes, I do think the price is very reasonable, at least compared to other language apps.
I haven’t had to deal with their support department a lot, but it’s great to hear they are responsive.
Noel
I’m a long time Yabla user, love it. I like bending the tool into ways it might not have been intended. E.g. use Scribe, but don’t listen, hit the Reveal Translation right away and try to type the Spanish (or your target language) translation without listening. Really gets you to start dynamically converting English to Spanish. Also, and this one is a big help, mimic the speakers. Use the slow play feature to start with, talk right along with the speaker (again, try not to use the Spanish caption), when you can talk right along with the speaker, increase the speed until at normal speed. It was crazy for me because not only did my spoken French (for me) improve, but I could understand so much more spoken French as well. Its like it changed my language processing speed.
This is a great review by the way, I’m probably more disappointed with the Flashcard feature than you, but its for the very reasons you listed. One thing not mentioned I think that is great… Yabla gives some great cultural exposure too, something you don’t get from a lot of other tools.
Great tips, Chris!
I agree that there’s a lot more you can do with Yabla than one would think.
A bit of creativity in your strategies can make all the difference.
Agree as well on the cultural exposure. Some videos almost make you believe that you are really there, which is highly beneficial for learning.
Yabla isn’t perfect, but if you can look past its limitations and use it in unorthodox ways, you’ll have one hell of a language learning tool at your disposal.