Busuu.com the online language learning community

Buusu is a company based in Madrid and run by two ex-students of mine, Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti, developing a language learning community with the aim of making language learning accessible and easy for everybody. Busuu has already more than 80,000 users from more than 200 different countries. They recently released a new version of busuu.com and left the beta phase, so I’d like to congratulate them for the great work they’ve done so far.

The new version includes an improved interface, online courses for each level of the Common European Framework of References for Languages, user rankings based on their activity in the community and most importantly a premium membership option.

Premium users paying 7,99 EUR/month will get:

• Audio for more than 3,000 key phrases and listening comprehension exercises for more than 150 dialogues
• Printable PDFs for more than 150 learning units
• Access to more than 35 Grammar Units
• Audio Podcasts for more than 150 learning units

What differentiates Buusu.com from its competitors is the quality of the content they provide and the easy to use interface that helps users keep track of their improvement. The premium membership is still relatively cheap compared to a normal language course in a school, so definitely something worth checking out if you’re trying to learn a foreign language. More details on Busuu’s blog.

On the negative side I have tried and failed to connect to real people in the first tries. Also I did not see a function that would allow for somebody to get paid for teaching a language without learning another one. Maybe that is not necessary but in my case frankly I would just rather pay something and learn. The language that I am learning now btw is German. I have started with Nina my girlfriend and now I am exploring other ways of learning German over the Internet.