Chatterbug

[rpg]

Wanted to start a thread for this resource; it's been mentioned occasionally on these forums over the past couple years but has never had a dedicated thread.

Chatterbug (http://chatterbug.com) is a subscription resource currently available for German, Spanish, and French. It's intended to be a fairly complete language learning platform for those languages, from beginner through B2 (in theory). The structure is essentially broken into two parts: self-study and live lessons.

The self-study is composed of a lot of small modules, each with around 20 or so (generally themed) vocabulary words and one or two small grammar lessons. Much of the time with self-study consists of doing a lot of SRS flashcards with the vocabulary words, Memrise-style. The system will also give you other activities to do: youtube videos (with target language subtitles available) that generally fit with the theme of the lesson, short reading passages (also themed, and generally specifically composed to hit the vocab), and writing prompts (which are purely for your own practice; they aren't corrected by anyone).

The live lessons are the more unusual feature. Essentially they're like 45-minute iTalki lessons, but scheduled and conducted through the Chatterbug platform, and instead of being fairly free-form like most iTalki lessons, they're strictly regimented. Each of the self-study modules has around 10 or so associated structured exercises to be done in a live lesson, which relate to the vocabulary and grammar from the module, and during the lesson you progress through a series of these exercises with a native-speaker tutor. For example, a recent module I did was about being sick and going to the doctor, and the grammar point was about the conditional past ("I would have...") for expressing regret. Then in the live lesson, we had a few exercises about the conditional past and some exercises around roleplaying being sick and seeing a doctor and so on. The live lessons typically start with straightforward, narrowly-scoped tasks (eg match these sentences to these pictures) and progress to open ended activities (tell me a story inspired by these pictures).

Because you're having 1:1 lessons with someone, Chatterbug is a paid service. There are a few different plans depending on how many live lessons a month you want (1, 4, 8, or unlimited-- though starting next week new unlimited subscriptions will be limited to 31 lessons per month, but existing subscribers will be grandfathered in).

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There ends my description-- onto my personal experience. A few weeks ago I signed up for the unlimited plan for French, with my French level around A2/B1. I've so far done 22 live lessons and around 24 hours of self-study.

The live lessons are really the star of the show for me. All of the self-study is really just to unlock and prepare for the live lesson exercises. I think the live lessons are pretty good and on the whole better than the average iTalki lesson I've done. Because of the structure, there's not much dead time, so you get to speak (and listen) a lot. For most of this time I've been concurrently taking in-person French classes in a small group, and on the whole I think my Chatterbug lessons have been a better use of time. On the flip side, they're a little variable depending on which tutor you do them with, with each tutor having a little bit of a different style. The site has features to let you favorite tutors or request lessons with certain tutors, but I've found myself mostly at the mercy of whoever is available for French (I think there are more options for Spanish and German, which are more established on their site).

On the flip-side, I have some criticisms of the self-study portion. I really don't like contextless, single-word SRS flashcards, and I find myself ending up doing a lot of those. It's a little bit better than doing a random Memrise or Anki deck, since the vocabulary does get used in other contexts (the infrequent readings and videos, and the live lessons). I still find it a little bit of a slog and not necessarily how I enjoy learning vocabulary.

I also dislike the writing prompts a lot, since they don't get corrected. I think this is partly a question of study preferences.

The vocabulary choices are a bit scattershot. I've been fed some truly stupid words, like l'écovolontariat (ecovolunteering, apparently) and l'expatriation (expatriation) while some pretty common words make no appearance at all, both more formal words like lorsque (256th in my frequency dictionary, a more formal way of saying "when" in some contexts) and more informal words like mec (a guy, very common in the spoken language). The spoken language in general is neglected here, as it is with many language learning products; there's a dearth of audio (only the occasional youtube video and the input from the live lessons) and little focus on the features of the spoken language (vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation).

Finally, I don't think Chatterbug is very good at the higher levels. My Spanish is a pretty solid B2; I've taken a few Spanish lessons and generally wasn't very happy with them-- there's a little too much structure, getting in the way of the more natural free-flowing conversation I'd prefer at this level, and I've found so far that the tutors are so used to speaking to students with low language levels and poor listening comprehension that they don't necessarily adopt a more natural speaking speed and language usage. But I've experienced this on iTalki before as well, and it's pretty tutor dependent. Furthermore, because their vocabulary progression isn't very logically structured (see above about common/uncommon words), when you skip more material to place into a higher level of their curriculum, the differences between what you know and what they think you know grow larger (they expect you to know a bunch of uncommon words from earlier lessons, and don't expect you to know some simpler words you likely already have learned). Regardless, at this level I think native materials are a much better use of your time.

Overall I think Chatterbug is a pretty interesting resource, and I'm planning on using it as the cornerstone of my French learning over the next few weeks. For my level and my needs, the live lessons are good enough to make up for defects in the other areas of the site, and with the unlimited lesson plan I'm getting a pretty good deal per hour-- indeed, too good of a deal, since as I mentioned above they're placing a limit of 31 lessons/month for new subscribers after March 23. Even though Chatterbug wants to be your all-in-one language resource, I do think it needs to be supplemented with more native input to cover some gaps, but when some day I eventually start learning German I think I'll at least consider it if it's still around.