Baselang Review: Frankly Overpriced And Hyped Spanish School
Written byLara Scott- Read time4 mins
- Comments6
- Unlimited sessions for a flat-rate fee
- Last minute lesson bookings
- Can book with multiple teachers
- Student progress tracked
- Inconsistency in teacher quality
- Outrageously overpriced
Baselang is a popular online lesson facilitator for Spanish (and local school) that offers unlimited lessons for an excessively high flat-rate monthly fee and an outrageously expensive intensive called Grammarless.
The teacher quality varies as with most lesson platforms.
NOTE: In my opinion, you’ll get a lot more use and value for money out this Spanish course or this one as alternatives to Baselang.
Make sure to check out my Spanish Language Resources page as well for other resources and recommendations.
Baselang’s a popular Spanish language school in Medellín, Colombia that offers “unlimited” online access to local Spanish language teachers.
They also have a trademarked course called Grammarless which is both an in-person and online month-long intensive.
The company itself, founded by Connor Grooms (who wrote an article titled How To Learn Spanish In One Month here a while back prior to starting Baselang), shot to popularity among online language bloggers fairly quickly, in part for its seemingly generous ‘unlimited lessons’ assurance.
What I will say is that like any Spanish classes, a lot of what you get out of it depends on you.
Baselang is truly unlimited – you can book as many sessions as you want from 6am to midnight (ET, USA). There also seem to be a ton of available Spanish teachers – there’s always someone available for a last-minute booking (in fact, one of the biggest selling points, in my opinion, is the ability to book a lesson with 5 minutes notice which is extremely convenient).
There is something worth mentioning, however.
While lessons are “unlimited” for a flat-rate fee, I feel that this is also disingenuous in a sense.
Why disingenuous?
Because very few people are actually in a position to take advantage of unlimited lesson availability.
There is a human capacity factor that isn’t mentioned.
So while you’re able to theoretically take dozens of lessons per week, in all likelihood, you’ll use a handful of lessons only, which means that you’re actually paying way more than you would if you used a service like italki.
Or another excellent alternative (if you want similar structure and bulk lessons) would be a platform like Lingoda.
UPDATE: Babbel recently released a new subscription product called Babbel Live which offers unlimited Spanish lessons for a specified subscription period. Impressively, they have a 12 month tier for only $599.
That’s an entire year of unlimited free Spanish lessons (online video call).
Hard to beat that, honestly.
On the plus side, Baselang is very professional, with a structured programme and well-planned lessons using slides.
There’s a Standard curriculum with ten levels to teach you the technical basics, and the selection of Electives lets you choose particular conversation topics. These can go pretty in-depth (e.g. hundreds of sessions for “Medicine”, dozens for “Business”). And for any one-on-one lesson, you would be given the flexibility to request to focus on any area you want.
Baselang boasts quick results of fluent, conversational Spanish in 20-30 hours (spoiler: it will take you a lot longer than this).
The Grammarless intensive boasts of fluent, 30 minutes of conversational Spanish after 1 month of lessons.
This is fairly standard for any dedicated student of practically any communicative approach class - 1 month of communicative, intensive instruction with a competent teacher should result in basic A2-level conversation.
For the life of me, I cannot understand how they justify $1,200 for this.
As for the unlimited classes, it really depends on your level of commitment. $149 is a flat fee per month, so the more hours you dedicate, the cheaper it is (but as I said, most people won’t get their money’s worth and would be better off using an alternative).
It could cost anywhere from $4 to $25 per hour depending on your usage.
That being said, quality of teaching also matters, and because of the number of teachers and various teaching styles, you do have to search around for the teachers that suit your learning style.
But you never know when they might leave, because the turnover rate in Baselang is reportedly high (widespread reports of teacher exploitation coupled with volatile conditions in some of the teacher countries).
Overall, Baselang is fine if money isn’t an issue and you have loads of free time, but if your time and/or money are important, I’d say check out italki or Lingoda.
For other alternatives, see this list of Spanish courses.
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