Author Archives: The busuu.com team

New strategic cooperation between busuu.com, The Guardian and Macmillan!

busuu.com is proud to announce our new partnership with the Guardian, and with Macmillan Education.

The Guardian is one of the UK’s leading daily titles, founded in 1821 and delivers liberal journalism to a global audience via its website. guardian.co.uk is one of the highest-traffic English-language news websites in the world. The award-winning Macmillan English Dictionary was first published in 2002 and is a one-stop reference for English speakers around the world.

As a first step within this agreement, we will now offer on busuu.com a new powerful learning tool for helping you to improve your English skills.

If you are a Premium users you can now practice and improve your English skills through reading the Guardian news articles (updated daily) and search for the definition of unknown words using the integrated dictionary provided by Macmillan. Then you can post your opinion about the articles and send it for correction to our English native speakers from our community.

Of course you will be also rewarded with juicy busuu-berries for this writing exercise! :-)

This means that on busuu.com you can now improve your English skills by reading the daily news!

These new features are completely online and fully integrated into our existing learning material. You can access the Guardian News Articles via your language area through the “live units” tab.

The Guardian News Articles and Macmillan dictionary are only available for our Premium users so don’t wait and subscribe to our Premium Membership now to improve your language skills much faster!

We are very excited to join forces with such renowned references as The Guardian and Macmillan! For now, News Articles are only available for our English-learners but we are working on establishing new partnerships for all our languages. So stay tuned, new exciting functions are coming soon!

Help us to save the language Busuu!

As you know, the name of our website busuu.com comes from the language Busuu from Cameroon in Africa, spoken by only 8 people.

This language is declared by the UNESCO as “critically endangered”. So, we from busuu.com had to do something in order to save this language from its extinction!

In summer 2010, we sent a film-crew to the remote village of Weh in the jungle of Cameroon to find the last 8 native speakers of Busuu and created a video clip together with them to promote their language.

The result was the following video:

We have also created a special website www.savebusuu.com where you can support our campaign to rescue Busuu, watch more funny videos in that language and even sing your own Busuu song too and send it to your friends!

Do you want to learn Busuu? We have prepared a special learning unit in Busuu so you can learn some phrases of this nearly extinct language on busuu.com!

This is probably the first piece of evidence of this language online so check out what a nearly extinct language from the jungle sounds like!

We have also created a Save Busuu Facebook fanpage, so please join it, invite your friends and support the Busuu language!

According to the UNESCO, more than 3000 languages are endangered around the world!

Join our campaign “Save Busuu”, share it with your friends and help us to rescue the Busuu language!

mən wέἑ (thanks in Busuu!)

PS: if you like the busuu song, you can download it here!

busuu.com enters into strategic partnership with leading language learning publisher Collins

We from busuu.com are very proud to announce that we have entered into a new strategic partnership with Collins, the world renowned British language reference publisher.

Collins is the leading brand for bilingual dictionaries in the UK and Europe and known throughout the world for its innovative dictionaries and language learning materials. Collins was founded by William Collins in 1819 and has been producing dictionaries for more than 150 years.

As a first step within this partnership, we will offer detailed Collins Grammar Guides for our English-speaking users learning Spanish, French, German and Italian. The Grammar Guides are completely online and fully integrated into our existing learning material. The guides provide you with detailed grammar explanations and are directly linked to our existing grammar units.

You can access the guides by clicking on the new Collins button within each grammar unit. This will lead you directly to the corresponding topic within the new Collins Grammar Guide.

Additionally, you can access these Grammar Guides via your home area or via your language area with the new Collins tab.

The guides are available from 7.99 EUR if you’re a Premium Member or for 9.99 EUR if you are a basic user. But watch out – until the 14th of November, we will offer a special 10% introductory discount for this new product! So hurry up and get your new Collins Grammar Guides now!

We are very excited to join forces with Collins, a heavyweight within language education, in order to enhance the language learning experience of our users! The Grammar Guides are just the first step of our partnership – new exciting courses available to all our users are coming soon!

Time to celebrate: busuu.com reaches 1,000,000 users!

Today is a very important day in the history of busuu.com: we have reached more than 1 million users! This makes us Europe’s largest online community for learning languages.

Starting as a simple idea just two-and-a-half years ago, busuu.com has grown to be huge! Since our launch in May 2008, our brilliant worldwide community has:

earned more than 220 million of busuu-berries
written more than 2.7 million exercises
done more than 4.8 million corrections
completed more than 15 million learning unit parts!

Assuming that each learning unit part normally takes around 10 minutes to complete, busuu.com has provided around 285 years of language learning…That is quite impressive for only two-and-a-half years of existence!

None of this would have been possible without you, so we would like to thank you very much for your support! Please keep helping our community to grow by inviting your friends to join busuu.com and you’ll be rewarded with our special travel course!

But we haven’t stopped yet – there are more exciting product launches coming up, which will make language learning even easier!

So today, the whole busuu.com team here in Madrid will open a bottle of champagne and we hope you will join us in our celebrations – cheers!

Try out our new alphabet section in all our 7 languages!

After implementing a special alphabet section for our new Russian course we received many requests from our users to offer the same for all the 7 languages we offer.

Here we go – we have now implemented the alphabet in our Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and English courses as well!

Click on any letter, and you will hear its pronunciation and see an example of its usage within a word.

You can enter the alphabet section by clicking on the new tab “Alphabet” within in each language area:

We hope you will like this new feature and we are sure that it will further support you in your language learning!