We’re very excited to be in the finals of The Europas – the European Tech Startup Awards again!
Last year you have helped us win the category ‘Best Education, Recruitment, Media Startup’.
With your help, we can do it again this year!
Please vote for us and click on the Facebook Like icon underneath busuu.com.
Thank you so much for being part of our great community!
While Halloween, or All Saint’s Eve, is most popular in America, countries around the world are now beginning to adopt this holiday too.
If you are planning to attend, or even host a Halloween party, you should make sure you know the most common words related to this holiday. Halloween words borrow from many different languages. Today, these words are used in countries all around the world.
Do you know where some of these words come from?
Let’s take a look at the most common ones:
HALLOWEEN
Halloween is a condensed form of the phrase All Hallow Even, i.e. All Saints’ Eve. Hallow means “holy”, so Halloween is the Eve of All Hallows, i.e. all saints. Hallow and Halloween derive from the Old English adjective halig (holy).
PUMPKIN
Pumpkin derives from the Greek pepon, a kind of melon eaten only when very ripe. The word root is very interesting: Latin took over pepon as pepo, then French produced popon/pompon, then pumpion, and finally pumpkin.
BROOM
There is no witch in town that would make a Halloween appearance without a broom. The word derives from a Germanic plant name that appears as bramo, bramma and bramio in various Germanic languages. So a broom essentially bears the Germanic name of the twig plant.
COFFIN
This word appears in various languages. In Greek it’s kophinus (a basket), in Latin cophinus and French cofin. Initially, the word meant ‘box’ but in the 16th century it took on two meanings, one of which is the dreaded coffin.
GHOST
In traditional belief and fiction, a ghost is the soul or spirit of a deceased person or animal that appears to the living. However, Halloween ghosts will be disappointed to know that their linguistic ancestors where neither scary nor vengeful. In Old English, ghost simply meant “spirit”, a meaning preserved when we refer to the Holy Ghost.
To get you in the right mood for Halloween, here are the top 10 Halloween songs of all time.
To learn more words related to this fantastic holiday, complete our fun Halloween exercise on busuu.com
We are very happy to announce a €3.5 million investment in busuu.com by PROFounders Capital and private investors as well as our headquarters relocation from Madrid to London.
Apart from improving our online and mobile language learning courses and developing brand new products to improve our service, we will use the investment to grow our team and give you the best language learning experience out there.
With the investment, we are also happy to add Brent Hoberman, co-founder of lastminute.com, to our board of advisers.
“We are thrilled to welcome on board Brent Hoberman and the PROfounders Capital team,” said Bernhard Niesner, busuu.com CEO and co-founder. “Brent’s valuable experience in building leading global internet companies will help us achieve our aim of becoming the world leader in language education.”
“We were really impressed by what busuu.com has achieved so far with very few resources,” added PROfounders Capital investment partner Brent Hoberman. “We are looking forward to supporting the company in its future growth plans and shaking up the global language learning market.”
At busuu.com, we have more than 25 million users in over 200 countries and we are growing at a rate of 40,000 new members per day – enough people to fill the seats of London’s Olympic stadium in just two days.
Join them now, register for free and start learning a language today!
Read more on TechCrunch and The Telegraph!
The holidays are almost over and this is the perfect time for brushing up on your language skills to get ahead with schoolwork or make your CV stand out!
To motivate you, we are offering a back-to-school promotion – enjoy a 15% discount on all our products until 15 September 2012!
To get you in the mood, here are our busuu.com top 10 motivational tips!
…and the best motivation to kick-start your language learning again:
now!It’s easy to apply the discount:
With our Premium Membership and our motivational tips you will get the most out of your busuu.com learning experience! Only until 15 September 2012!
Did we miss a motivational tip? Just add your own tips to our list!
What do you think will be the most important language in the future? Which languages should children learn? And how important are language skills for your career?
Help us to identify future key trends in language learning by sharing your opinion! Please take 5 minutes to answer these and other important questions in the busuu.com Language Barometer Survey 2012.
We are running the Language Barometer Survey in partnership with Madrid’s IE Business School, one of the world’s leading postgraduate education institutions. This is the second year that we are doing the Language Barometer and we’re very curious to see how estimations about language learning and views on future key trends have changed over the past year.
We want to find out which are the most effective technologies and learning methods for you, so that we can meet your needs even better than before and prepare busuu.com for the future.
That’s why your opinion matters to us – start the survey now in your language:
Thank you in advance for taking part in the busuu.com Language Barometer Survey 2012.
Of course we will share the survey results with you on this blog within a few weeks!
