Smart Language Learner

Language Learning for Normal People ;-)

  • Articles
  • About
  • Contact Me
  • Tools I Recommend

Yabla Review: I Spent 7 Hours With Yabla – Here are my Thoughts

19 November, 2018 - by Noel van Vliet 11 Comments

Facebooktwitter

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, but 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.

Special Yabla Discount:

Click here to get 25% off on an annual Yabla subscription

Or...

Click here to get 16% off on a 3-month Yabla subscription

Special Yabla Discount:

Get 25% off on an annual Yabla subscription

Click the link below to see the discounted offer on the Yabla website:

https://www.smartlanguagelearner.com/go/yabla-promorv/

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 drama 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:

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 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!

If you buy a Yabla subscription for your kids, you can use a filter and have only family-friendly videos show up.

However, technology-savvy kids nowadays can probably turn it off easily.

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.

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.

Vocabulary Review is a somewhat disappointing tool that does not feature video content. It’s a boring and basic flashcard game, but I guess it gets the job done if you only want to review words from a certain video.

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.

By the way, FluentU also has this feature.

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:

  1. You can’t seem to add phrases or idioms to the flashcards
  2. 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.
  3. 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 $9.95/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 almost $20.

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:

Yabla Spanish Free Videos

Yabla French Free Videos

Yabla German Free Videos

Yabla Italian Free Videos

Yabla Chinese Free Videos

Yabla English Free Videos

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.

As an overall product, FluentU is more robust than Yabla.

It 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 drama series are a strong motivating force that can help you learn a language.

If you want to know more about FluentU, check out my 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

  • Great for listening skills
  • Entertaining video content
  • Flashcards with video
  • Some good games to help you learn the video content

Cons

  • Weak vocabulary review game
  • Inconsistent audio quality

 

 

Facebooktwitter

Noel van Vliet

Noel is the founder of Smart Language Learner. When he isn't learning languages or writing about it, you can find him enjoying the good life of Costa Rica, where he lives with his wife and 4 children.

Affiliate disclosure: (Some of) the links in the post above are affiliate links, which means we’ll receive a small commission if you click on the link and purchase the product. Please note: we only recommend products and services that we believe will add value to you, our readers. If you decide to purchase through one of the affiliate links, you’ll be supporting Smart Language Learner, which in turn will lead to an improved site with more helpful content for language learners. So thanks for that in advance!

 

Tips and Advice to Help You Get Fluent!

To get notified when I publish a new article or guide, sign up to my newsletter below.

I won’t bribe you with anything, other than saying you’ll be a valuable member of the club!

Enter your email address below to get started:

Your privacy is important! No Spam. For more info please check our privacy policy here.


Comments

  1. Andy Smith says

    3 June, 2017 at 9:06 pm

    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.

    Reply
    • Noel van Vliet says

      3 June, 2017 at 11:59 pm

      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….

      Reply
  2. Aidan says

    3 August, 2017 at 4:44 am

    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.

    Reply
    • Noel van Vliet says

      3 August, 2017 at 1:59 pm

      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

      Reply
  3. Don says

    14 March, 2018 at 2:33 pm

    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!

    Reply
    • Noel van Vliet says

      14 March, 2018 at 5:43 pm

      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.

      Reply
  4. Suzanne Waddell says

    10 May, 2018 at 4:42 pm

    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?

    Reply
    • Noel van Vliet says

      10 May, 2018 at 5:50 pm

      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.

      Reply
  5. KevinG says

    23 May, 2018 at 12:12 am

    I like the Argentine telenovelas

    Reply
  6. Bob Cochrane says

    12 October, 2018 at 1:30 pm

    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.

    Reply
    • Noel van Vliet says

      12 October, 2018 at 2:34 pm

      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.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Popular on Smart Language Learner

  • Dare to Feel Bad About Your Language Learning
  • Here’s a Simple Way to the Win the Battle Against Learning Frustration
  • Why You Shouldn’t Be Too Nice When You’re Abroad
  • No Language Is Easy to Learn – and Why It’s Time to Stop Believing Otherwise
  • Two Essential Rules for Senior Language Learners

Hi, I’m Noel van Vliet

Noel van Vliet

I’m the CEO, Account Executive and Quality Control Coordinator of Smart Language Learner…

Then I always wake up and realize I’m just an average guy with a website about language learning…

  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2019