Tag Archives: busuu

82

A look back at 2010 and a warm welcome to 2011!

Last year is already history as 2011 has started with a lot of positive energy! Nevertheless, we believe it’s still worth taking a closer look at all the stuff that happened with busuu.com in 2010.

January

February

  • busuu.com was a finalist in the BBVA Open Talent competition, being the 5th most voted project (with more than 6,000 votes) out of more than 400 participants.
  • We launched our fully interactive Brazilian Portuguese language course, the 6th language in our portfolio
  • We translated our interface into Portuguese to welcome our new Portuguese-speaking users (mainly from Brazil), who enriched our growing community with their positive Latin vibes!
  • We closed our first financing round with an Austrian business angel, enabling us to further strengthen our rapid international growth.

March

  • Our project received more awards as we won the Innovators Award at the CeBIT fair in Germany, one of the most important events for the digital industry in Europe.
  • We launched our new groups feature, letting our users create their own content around topics of their choice; this popular feature now has more than 5,000 groups.
  • We surprised our users with our fun Easter egg hunt – so watch out again this Easter for the golden egg to win some Premium Memberships! ;-)

May

  • busuu.com had its second birthday which we celebrated with more than 450,000 users registered users from over 200 different countries.
  • We were selected as the Red Herring 100 European Winner, a competition that recognises the most innovative companies in Europe.

June

  • We launched our Travel course for all the language basics you need when travelling abroad, available as a PDF for easy use on the go.

July

August

  • We launched our first language game, in which users can challenge each other on their language skills to win juicy busuu berries!
  • We implemented our interactive Russian course, bringing our total offering to 7 different languages and opening the gates to our active Russian community.

September

October

December

Phew…as you can see, 2010 was a very busy, successful year for our small start-up! Thank you again for all of your support and feedback – the above has only been possible with your help!

But watch out for 2011! We have ambitious plans and exciting new features in the pipeline already – so rest assured that we won’t stop until we create the best language learning solution on Earth! :-)

So, we wish our users all the best and are looking forward to a fantastic 2011!

78

The language Busuu

Did you know where the name of our website busuu.com comes from?

Busuu is actually a language from Cameroon in Africa, spoken by only 8 people!

It was first “discovered” by the French professor of linguistics Roland Breton in the year 1986. According to his and more recent research, the language, with the ISO 639 identifier “bju“, belongs to the Niger-Congo language family or in detail, the so called unclassified Southern Bantoid language family.

The UNESCO included the language Busuu within their highly interesting Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. There, the language is classified as “critically endangered“. Below you can see exactly the area, where the language is supposed to be spoken by those 8 people. Just click on the picture and you can find out more about the region which is close to the border between Nigeria and Cameroon.

Who are those 8 people that still speak Busuu? How do they look like? Do they know about busuu.com? ;-) Maybe one day, we will find out…

The UNESCO estimates that there are around 3,000 endangered languages world-wide. This is nearly half of the 6,500 languages spoken around the globe. Since 1950, already 230 languages extinct!

We from busuu.com hope that we can also contribute to preserve some of those endangered languages. Do you remember our campaign to rescue the Silbo Gomero, the nearly extinct whistled language from the Gomera Islands in Spain?

Shortly after the launch of our video, for which we received a Silver Lion in the International Marketing Festival in Cannes, the Silbo Gomero was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity!

We are absolutely convinced that if busuu.com can be used to learn “large languages” such as English or Spanish, our platform could also serve to preserve endangered languages.

So maybe one day, we will make our contribution that you can learn Busuu on busuu.com! :-)

76

busuu.com nominated as ‘Best Website Application 2010′ and ‘Best Learning Start-Up 2010′

We are very proud to announce that busuu.com has been nominated twice for the highly prestigious TechCrunch Europe ‘The Europas Awards‘! TechCrunch is Europe´s most important and respected tech blog.

We are very pleased about these nominations, especially as busuu.com was already nominated in two categories at last year´s Europas Awards! Additionally, this nomination continues our already quite impressive list of nominations and awards we have received so far.

This year, our language learning community is nominated in two categories (the links will lead you directly to the voting page):

We are very happy to see that this year TechCrunch has openend the new category for Learning Startups. This shows the rising importance of e-learning for the whole internet industry.

So many thanks in advance for your vote – please spread the word as every vote counts! We will keep you updated on this blog about the result of this awards – please keep your fingers crossed!

UPDATE: We have received a “highly commended” within the Best Learning Start-Up category! This is an amazing recognition for our work this year and we would like to thank you all for your great support!

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Learn to speak Russian for free with busuu.com!


Привет (that’s ‘hello’ in Russian)!

Spoken by more than 280 million people, Russian is the largest native language in Europe and the 8th most important language in the world. In addition, we received a lot of requests from our users to add this language to the courses we offer.

So, we’re very excited to launch our new Russian language course on busuu.com!

Learn Russian with free access to more than 150 audiovisual learning units across 4 different levels. In addition, you can  connect with thousands of Russian speakers from our rapidly growing community.

Russian Tree

You want to learn Russian? This is how you start:

To start your free interactive Russian course, simply:

  1. go to your settings page
  2. add Russian as a language you want to learn
  3. click on your new snowy Russian tree in your language garden to begin!

Start learning Russian with our free language course now!

If you are a premium user, you will also have immediate access to all of the new Russian course’s Premium features, such as audio dialogues and key phrases, PDFs, podcasts and much more!

So upgrade your account now to enjoy busuu.com’s full range of award-winning learning tools for seven different languages!

Test yourself with our Russian alphabet challenge!

Russian alphabet characters are not the same as the Latin alphabet. So, we have adapted our existing course structure and added a new Russian alphabet section.

Listen to the entire Russian alphabet and then test your skills with our fun Russian alphabet challenge!

Привет to all our Russian-speaking members!

We would also like to welcome all our Russian-speaking users to busuu.com – you can now use our website with a complete Russian interface! Just go to your settings page and change your interface language to ‘Russian’ or have a look at our new Russian frontpage http://www.busuu.com/ru.

До свидания (that’s ‘goodbye’) for now – we hope you enjoy trying out our new Russian course. Stay tuned for more important updates within the next few weeks!

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Try out our new language learning game!

Imagine you could improve your language skills and challenge your busuu.com friends at the same time to see who is best at memorising vocabulary?

Believe it or not…it is now possible on busuu.com! If you want to see for yourself, check out our great new language learning game!

Playing this game is simple and fun: you play against one of your friends and try to match words from two different languages into pairs. The player who gets the most pairs right, wins the game and gets five tasty busuu-berries!

To access the game, you have two options:

  • click on the new ‘Games’ tab within your language area. Then pick among the available players and send him or her an invitation to play by pressing the button.

  • challenge another user directly by going on their profile and clicking on the new button .

Once the other user accepts the challenge, you will enter the game room and the game begins!

When it´s your turn, click on the cards on the left hand side and find the matching words or phrases in two different languages. But hurry because time is running! If you find the right pair, the cards will flip and you will receive a point.

Whoever has the most points when all cards are turned, wins the game and receives five juicy busuu-berries!

Will you be the new language game champion on busuu.com?

We are sure you will love our new language learning game and are looking forward to your feedback!  Stay tuned for more exciting new features on busuu.com!