What is Verbling?
Verbling is a marketplace of professional language teachers that are are native speakers. They offer dozens of popular language lessons including English lessons, French lessons, Spanish lessons, and much more.
Like Rype, the philosophy that Verbling believes in is learning with humans, instead of software. When they initially launched, Verbling was a chatroulette replica for language learning, and just recently they have pivoted to focus on paid lessons. They also used to offer group lessons where students can hang out and connect for free, but they seem to have also discontinued this service.
How is Rype different from Verbling?
While both Rype and Verbling offer professional language lessons online, there are fundamental core differences between the two. In this Verbling review guide, we’ll share some of the features that Verbling offers and how Rype is different.
1. Pay Per Lesson (Verbling) vs. Simple Flat Price (Rype)
Verbling requires you to pay per each lesson you book. Like many one-off purchases, this leads to a premium cost since you’re not purchasing in bulk. They do offer lesson packages where you can buy 5 or 10 lessons at a time for a discount, but this also comes with its disadvantages which we’ll explain below.
1. Just like a drop-in gym, there’s a lack of incentive for students to continue their lessons after the first lesson experience. It requires you to pay every time you take a lesson, and that can be a burden psychologically. Think about paying every time you rent a movie versus paying a simple monthly price on Netflix.
2. Teachers set their own price on Verbling, which means that they’re not only changing their prices as often as they want, but usually charge a premium. Especially when the likelihood of a student coming back is low, their pricing and teaching methods are misaligned with the success of their students.
3. As we mentioned, Verbling allows you buy lessons in bulk up to 10. However, this means you’re stuck with the one teacher you bought lessons from, and relying on their availability schedule. Since you’ve already paid the upfront cost, it’s unlikely you’re going to switch teachers, which is the point.
Rype, like Netflix, has introduced a new model to language lessons. It’s a simple, flat fee where you don’t have to think about pulling out your credit card for each lesson. You can focus on what matters, which is consistent learning, and finding teachers that are fit to meet your needs. Best of all, you’re never restricted to one teacher, so if one is busy, you can simply book a lesson with another teacher. For no extra costs, or hassle.
2. Rype Teachers are Handpicked
Verbling states to have 5-star rated teachers on their platform, which we can never deny or confirm.
What we can tell you is, Rype handpicks every one of our teachers for not just qualifications, but personality and professionality. We want our students to feel in a comfortable setting when they’re practicing a new language, and we take the little details into consideration, including a teacher’s level of patience, friendliness, and interesting hobbies.
3. Rype is Built for Busy People
Verbling and Rype both give you the option of learning anywhere you want, and almost anytime you want. However, every lesson on Verbling is at least an hour long. This may not matter for some people, but for many busy people, that extra 30 minutes a day can add up if you extend that to a month or year from now.
Most of the people we’ve surveyed had a free slot of 20-30 minutes during the morning, lunch break, and night time to do something for themselves. That could be reading, exercise, or learning a language.
This is why we built Rype with 30 minute lessons as a standard time slot, allowing anyone to fit lessons into their busy lifestyle.
At Rype, we also added one important feature to make learning even more seamless and convenient for the busy individual. We built an on-demand scheduler, which allows you to schedule lessons according to your time availability versus depending on your teacher’s schedule. All you have to do is tell us when you’re free, and we’ll show you language teachers that’s available at that time, whether it’s late at 11PM or early in the morning at 6AM.
4. Verbling is Only For Speaking. Rype Offers a Personalized Language Program
Verbling is strictly focused on helping you speak. Teachers on Verbling are not required to provide a lesson plan for its students, and the sessions are purely conversation. This could be good for some learners, but we wanted to provide the option of both.
Meaning, Rype sessions can be purely conversational to improve your speaking skills. But if you want the benefits of having a personalized lesson program with useful exercises, assignments, and curriculum, your teachers can provide it for you.
Verbling Review: Conclusion
In conclusion, Verbling offers a premium cost solution compared to alternatives like iTalki. Their marketing points to having better teachers, but it does come at a high cost. As we mentioned, many teachers offer their services as high as $40 to $50 per session, for purely conversational practice.
While these teachers may have experience to back it up, the cost may not be worth the value for many language learners looking for more than just conversation.
At the end of the day, there’s no way of knowing until you try it for yourself. We encourage you to explore your options, and decide which is the right solution for you after you’ve experienced them.
For visual comparison, you can take a look at our benefit comparison chart to get a full picture of our Verbling review, along with some other solutions.
Hope this Verbling review was helpful to you.
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