BaseLangReviews of baselang.com

Baselang used to be great....But I agree with a previous poster that lately they have been sketchy, and now want to record all classes and are making it mandatory as of September 1st. This ruins the level of comfort that a student has with their teacher. Who wants to know that a recording exists of every mistake they made, or of every time they had a discussion about an embarrassing topic? They say it is to ensure the quality of instruction, but I do not believe this. There would be no reason to record every single lesson if this were the case. This seems more like a "gotcha" for the teachers, which I do not want to be a part of. I have been with Baselang for just over 5 years. I came for the DELE program and stayed for the quality of a few teachers. The curriculum for the DELE C2 program is terrible and does not match the rigor of the exam. I had to bring my own materials to use with the teachers, as the ones provided on the platform were useless and riddled with errors. I will say, with the help of two excellent Baselang teachers and the curriculum I bought separately, I did achieve C2 certification in May of 2022. Once students notice a teacher is good, many will flock to book them. You can select up to 3 teachers as your favorites, and you can book them a couple of days in advance. However, you have to book right at the time when the new schedule becomes active, which for me is right in the middle of the day. This is because other students are trying to book the same teacher. Otherwise, you will lose out on the slot or slots that you want. Additionally, once lots of students have noticed that a teacher is good and they get regular students, Baselang will move them to their Bootcamp program, making them unavailable to Real World and Dele Students, either for part of their shift or the whole shift, depending on the teacher and the program selection of the Bootcamp student. Follow the money - look at the prices of the Bootcamp program vs the Real World program. Baselang says that is not why they move the teachers, but I also do not believe this. When the teacher is moved, they will send you an email if the teacher is one of your favorites, letting you know they will be unavailable. They usually say the teacher is doing "administrative tasks". Baselang has also all but abandoned the DELE program with respect to the teachers. At the time of my writing this, there will be no teachers available to teach a DELE class for the next hour. However, there are still 3 Real World teachers available. In two hours, there is one DELE teacher available, but 5 Real World. It is always like that. Frequently, there are no teachers available on the DELE schedule, and students have to book through Real World, where there are many available teachers. And, if a lot of students book that teacher through DELE, they will just move them to the Real World program. Over the years, there have been many issues with the platform, and these issues continue if you are using it via a mobile device. Sometimes, the scheduling time may come about when you are out running errands, at work, etc, and have to schedule through phone, etc, rather than a computer. You have to click and cross your fingers, because many times the platform has dropped my scheduled classes because the button to accept is hidden behind the panel notifying you of how much time you have left to book. Then the platform drops all of the hours you have selected and makes you start again, giving an error message. I have continued to stay with Baselang after achieving my certification because I want to speak, read, and write Spanish at a very high level. I know that as a language learner, I need continuous practice to maintain that high level of Spanish. The teachers at Baselang have helped me to do that. I have even recommended Baselang to many others interested in learning Spanish, and to teachers of high school students looking for Spanish tutors. However, as soon as the recording of classes begins, I will be ending my subscription as well.

Let me start off by saying that I have been a member of this platform for several years on and off. In the beginning it was great. I had the BEST teacher and I took classes with her several hours a week...sometimes for 2 hours at a time. She then disappeared for a little but and then returned only to finally quit. My issues now are as follows: For starters, it is impossible to communicate with the teachers via chat as they do not receive notifications. Also, they are not trained to know where quizzes are for the electives. Sometimes they spend 10-15 minutes trying to locate a quiz and it just wastes your time and money. On top of that, the administration sometimes hides the chat function so when you are messaging them if they don't feel like talking to you anymore the chat button goes away. There are zero teachers from Spain which makes me extremely upset. Also, the Wi-Fi where the teachers are based is usually painfully slow. Sometimes I wait 3 minutes for their screens to share or they get frozen, and yes, I know for a fact that it is their Wi-Fi and not mine. Despite these issues, I have remained on the platform for now as it is fairly cheap. They did increase their monthly unlimited fee from $149-179 which is so excessively greedy (an increase of $5-10 is one thing, but $30??). I get that it is unlimited, but the average person cannot spend hours and hours in classes as most people are working as well. They definitely lost my business as a result of that because if it was still $149 per month, I would be paying them a lot more than the $9 a month I pay now. My final gripe is that it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to stay with the same teacher consistently. Every single time I find a teacher I like they either quit, leave for "administrative tasks" (this happened 3 times to me), or they are fully booked. Even if you favorite them and get advanced booking options, it is still EXTREMELY difficult. So I started to take classes with whoever I could, whenever I could. The problem with this is that every time I get someone new they spend 5-10 minutes chatting with me (what's your name, how do you pronounce it, where are you from, what do you do for a living etc., etc.) before we get to work. So in the end, I accomplish way less than I wanted to in the class. I understand that if it's the first time they meet you it is good to have some introductory conversation, but since I can barely get the same instructor twice, I am spending every class saying the same thing for the first 10 minutes regardless of the fact that I leave a note of what I want to cover in class.

The idea of a subscription site for language learning is great. Baseland didn't work for me because in their approach, it is nearly impossible to have a regular schedule, and even more impossible to always work with specific teachers. Both issues were a problem for me, particularly since not all teachers have the same skill or passion for this job. While it didn't work for me this time, I might give Baselang another try if I ever get more control over my schedule.

I read the materials before class and then book a class. When i am with the teacher, i just read the same lesson again. I can study the lessons faster independently. The classes with a teacher seems to be a waste of my time. I'm not impressed nor have I seen any real teaching skills. I have tried several teachers. I have seen one of my teachers looking out the window. A couple of them were eating. Seems like every teacher just has me read the lesson. Pretty boring for both of us.

There is no way to filter by teachers who teach children. They provide a huge list in the help section, but you then have to manually go through each one to see if they have any availability, or are even on the platform any more. Most of the teachers had no availabilty. Scheduling was difficult as the platform does not set itself to your local timezone, so you are having constantly to check time zones, this combined with the fact that there was barely any availability from any of the teachers makes the "unlimited" monthly fee, not such a good deal after all. Luckily I got a 7 day trial, but I won't be subscribing.

I was lucky to meet a great friend and great teacher through baselang but that doesn't mean baselang was a good way to learn. Their system structure isn't great for looking tbh and I instead paid my teacher privately the same price he was earning a month just for teaching me. They earn less than $1 an hour for the majority of teachers as they're from Venezuela. Big exploitation and the CEO knows exactly what's he's doing. Privileged white American taking advantage of the poorer American countries.

I have found great teachers on this website, and it is well set up and I have had a great experience in how much I’ve learned and how easy it is to schedule. I would rate them as five stars, except for the fact that they pay their teachers the equivalent of somewhere between .25 and .50 per hour. This is not a livable wage. Period. Not for anyone, not even in Latin American countries is this livable, and there are very good teachers on here with years of experience. Someone needs to report them.