Any tips for learning a new language at my age? (50s) via Babbel?

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2025-12-04T21:38:52Z

I learned French to schoolboy level as a, well, schoolboy. I've remembered quite the remarkable amount I think. Learned The Klingon Language must be 20 years ago, to a point where I could converse with other speakers to some extent, but never the best.

More recently I've become quite interested in historical linguistics, from watching Simon Roper with Old English, and Jackson Crawford. Old English fascinates me as we were never considered clever enough at school to study English properly - that was only for the clever kids.

Because I couldn't find a good Frisian online learning resource, I decided to try my hand at modern German.

Been following Babbel for about 2 months now so super early. I "completed" the first set of lessons and have been doing the vocabulary tests to try and make sure these sink in before progressing, but I find that I regularly only get 2/10, 3/10 on the flashcards.

I've started doing whole first lesson set again, and I find them really easy. I'm basically intuiting a lot of the questions from knowledge of English, French and "common sense" I suppose. Is it odd that I can 100% the lessons easily and quickly, but the vocabulary tests just aren't there for me? My listening and speaking seems quite good according to the app.

Is it too early to tell (I think it might be), should I supplement Babbel with something else, like live learning (perhaps eventually, not right now - I think it'd be pointless at such a low level).

Anything else? Interested in anyone's thoughts.

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