Yabla Chinese

Yabla is one of the oldest language learning multimedia sites on the internet (if not the oldest). It has been in existence since 2001, according to its website! For a language learning platform, this is an extraordinarily impressive run of continuous operation (especially with all the more recent competitors) Yabla Chinese was the first of its type – an interactive video-based online Chinese course. It has a massive content repository that most Chinese students would never be able to exhaust. It offers a combination of actual, original footage as well as YouTube videos that have been outsourced.

"Well, can't I just go to YouTube and watch all those videos for free?" you might wonder. Yes, it is correct. However, Yabla's service (which is very similar to FluentU's) consists of complex and interactive video controls. Yabla is a "video wrapper" that allows you to change the speed of the video, choose timestamps and words, and seek up definitions for those terms. This is really the essence of Yabla. The Yabla video wrapper removes subtitles from the movie and places them on the website, allowing you to toggle them on and off and select the words. There are also games and exercises that interact with the videos.

The sheer volume of content available on Yabla helps it stand out after all this time. Yabla has thousands of videos for all skill levels. They're brief (which is ideal), and the quantity of the content library ensures that you'll never run out of things to watch and learn from.

• Rating: 4.5/5 stars
• Cost: Starts at $12.95 a month
• Pros:
  • Enormous collection of Chinese videos to learn from
  • Very affordable
    Well-established company with a solid reputation
• Cons:
  • Slightly dated interface
• Enroll here: https://chinese.yabla.com/