Name: Babbel Radio Ad
Uploaded: 2022-11-22T21:15:03+00:00
Duration: 1 min
Description: A radio advertisement for the language learning service Babbel aired in the United States in 2021 and 2022. One of the few remaining readers of my own blog has written comments there that, through 202

1 year ago

Babbel Foreign Language Foreign Language Education German Language German Berlin

A radio advertisement for the language learning service Babbel aired in the United States in 2021 and 2022.

One of the few remaining readers of my own blog has written comments there that, through 2021, he heard radio ads for a language learning service called Babbel which states various reasons to learn this or that language (i.e. from Babbel), and the ad stated that the reason to learn German was "to take a new job." This same reader was able to hear and record that ad in January 2022, and he sent me the audio. So, here you be, for the benefit of posterity.

For the record, I am a native St. Louisan who currently resides in Cologne, Germany.

Anyway, the part at the beginning which states that: "Whether you want to learn Spanish for future travel plans, French to connect with extended family, or maybe German to land a new job." Let me translate (pun intended) that advertising leetspeak into plain English: "If I want to go south of the border to troll for d!&k, I'll learn Spanish. If I want to blow through my daddy's money constantly schlepping between Paris, Geneva and The Riviera, I'll learn French. But if I actually want to accomplish something, and be productive in life, I'll learn German!"

Which is not a surprise, because Babbel is part of a larger media company called Lesson Nine GmbH, whose world headquarters is in...Berlin. So this ad doesn't surprise me. Germans are chauvinistic about their language.
Unfortunately, what they are not with regards to their language is jealous. All you have to do is spend as much as one day in a large German city to see and hear all the Anglicisms to realize that.

But it's not a new thing: Germans have tended to be bad about letting themselves get dominated on language politics. For a few centuries, because there was even then a centuries old true proper nation-state with a centrally developed and guarded language right next door, French did to the German languages (both Hoch and the many dialects) what English is doing to it today.

This part about precisely how Babbel teaches a foreign language, sounds like they adapted the Farnsworth method for teaching Morse Code.

Oh and one more thing: The real reason to learn German is so that God can understand you.