Tag Archives: language

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Celebrate our 5th birthday with our top 5 learning tips!

On 16 May 2013, busuu.com, the world’s largest online language learning community, will celebrate its 5th birthday!

It has been a fun and exciting journey over the past 5 years, and we are now joined by over 30 million users worldwide, learning up to 12 languages with busuu.com.

en-happybirthday

 To mark this momentous occasion, we have compiled our Top 5 language learning tips!

Here are the top 5 busuu.com learning tips to help you find fresh motivation: 

  • Set a goal - Easily track your learning progress with My Goal to see how often you should study each week to reach your aim.
  • Have a ‘foreign language’ day - Immerse yourself in the culture of the language you are learning – for example, watch a movie in the original version, listen to songs or cook a typical meal.
  • Read a newspaper or watch our Live Units – Pick out an interesting topic and write a review about it. Your desire to express your opinion will give you extra motivation!
  • Talk to native speakers – This is an essential part of learning. Not sure who to talk to? Try out busuu-talk and have a conversation with a native speaker!
  • Be brave – Everybody makes mistakes when learning a foreign language, so help out others by correcting their posts. They will do the same for you!

 

Feeling inspired?

As it’s our birthday, a very special occasion, why not complete our special occasions learning unit “I wish you…” and test out your language skills today!

Complete unit now!

162

New iPad app: learn English, for kids!

With the brand new busuu.com iPad app for kids, children will have fun while quickly and easily learning 150 English words. Educate, engage and entertain at the same time!

Our very first language-learning product for children teaches 150 words of English through a carefully structured course of 30 learning units, packed full of exciting educational games. And you can download the basic version for free!

A magical growing garden to reward learning. The busuu.com Kids app can be a shared experience: progress can be monitored at a glance in the child’s very own language-learning garden. Children will be delighted to watch their garden flourish as they learn, motivating them to continue.

Every time the child completes an exercise, a watering can will water a flower in their language garden to make it grow. And each plant holds a secret to discover – their flowers are faces made out of fun vocabulary pictures, created to make the kids laugh!

Stimulating activities, at home or on the go. Colourful illustrations by leading artists and audio recordings by a professional voice actor all create a stimulating and engaging learning environment. There are also plenty of animations to make sure children stay interested. The use of text is limited and all the exercises are clear and self-explanatory, so that they can easily complete the activities without guidance. No need to help – they can amuse themselves and learn wherever they are, whether at home or in the car.

Download our free iPad app for kids now! Designed by experts, made for children

Each lesson follows a specially developed 5-step methodology to help kids:

  • discover new words
  • learn vocabulary
  • test understanding
  • get training in spelling and phonetics
  • create fun works of art with new words.

 

Download the free basic version now!

The basic busuu.com iPad app for children is free and includes 3 learning units. Once you have downloaded it, you can choose to upgrade for the full course of 30 learning units. Hours of fun and education – all for less than the price of an equivalent children’s book. The learning units cover engaging topics such as farm animals, clothes, toys and the weather.

Download the free busuu.com iPad app for kids from the app store

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2012 – what a great year it was!

2012 was a fantastic year for busuu.com which saw many improvements, new features and products!

Here is an overview of our highlights of 2012:

January 2012

  • To celebrate the new year, we launched a new language! Our users can now learn Japanese for free on busuu.com! Japanese is the mother tongue of over 130 million people and the 10th most spoken language in the world.
  • Great news for all our mobile users! We launched an update for our iPhone/iPad app. Now, all units in our popular apps for iPhone/iPad are automatically activated if you are a Premium member.

February 2012

  • Chinese was added to the list of busuu.com languages. Users can now learn Chinese for free on busuu.com! It’s the most spoken language in the world and the mother tongue of one quarter of the global population.

March 2012

  • Profile customisation: Make your profile stand out with this feature on busuu.com! If you’re a Premium Member, you can create a Photo Gallery to share your favourite images with our community.
  • New writing exercises with pictures from National Geographic: Learn with National Geographic Pictures on busuu.com as part of our Live Units! You can improve your writing skills by practising new picture-based writing exercises, no matter your level!
  • Language level test: Users can now test their language level to find out which course they should begin with.
April 2012
May 2012
  • On 10 May 2012, busuu.com celebrated its 4th birthday!
  • We have launched My Goal, our improved learning progress tracker, you can find out how many hours you should study per week to finish your course by a certain date. This way you’ll be sure to complete your Spanish Course before you board that plane!

June 2012

  • We launched two new apps for iPhone and iPad, so you can now learn Chinese and Japanese for free on your mobile. Both apps are also available for Android.
  • We launched our improved dialogues,  to improve your listening comprehension! We’ve added new functions that will help you understand the dialogues even better!

July 2012

  • busuu.com apps reach 10 milion downloads! In less than two years, our apps for Android, iPhone and iPads were downloaded over 10 million times! Since then, we register 20,000 new app downloads every day!
August 2012
October 2012
  • We were 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.
  • We have introduced Checkpoints – a simple new feature that will help you to learn new words and phrases and remember them!
November 2012
  • We have re-launched busuutalk – and it’s now better than ever before! Following your suggestions and feedback, we were happy to announce that busuu.com had launched a brand new version of busuutalk.
  • busuu.com won the first price at the Seven Ventures Pitch Day - a €4m media budget in Germany!
December 2012
So you can see, it was an exciting year here at busuu.com, and hopefully for you too!

Thank you for being part of busuu.com, the world’s largest online language learning community! What makes busuu.com special is our interactive community. Without you, we would not have reached all these milestones in 2011!

 

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Challenge your friends to win 50 busuu-berries!

Do you have a competitive spirit? You can now challenge your friends on busuu.com! See who’s learning languages faster and get 50 juicy busuu-berries busuu-berry if you win the challenge!

To challenge a friend you just need to:

  1. Click on the new challenge icon busuu Challenge on your friend’s profile
  2. If your friend accepts the challenge, click on “Go”
  3. Finish the three units assigned to you plus the test in less than 24 hours

busuu Challenge

The busuu Challenge is available to everybody, Premium Members Premium Member and basic members. Start a busuu challenge now!

As a reward you will get 50 busuu-berries busuu-berry if you win! But be careful, if you lose the challenge, you will also lose 50 busuu-berries busuu-berry.

Go to your course area and click on “busuu Challenge” in the new menu section “Fun and Games”. In your current challenge, you will see how much time is left, how many units you still have to complete and how many units your opponent did so far.

You can also check your challenge history to look at previous challenges or look for new friends to set up a new challenge with, if you’re currently not challenging anybody.

What are you waiting for? Challenge a friend and encourage him to do 3 learning units within 24 hours! If you both win, you both get 50 busuu-berries busuu-berry! Good luck!

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Check out our improved dialogues!

Practise your listening comprehension with our improved dialogues! We’ve added new functions that will help you understand the dialogues even better! If you’re a Premium MemberPremium Member you can now:

  1. See the part that is being spoken in yellow
  2. Pause the dialogue wherever you want
  3. Repeat any sentence that you want to hear again
busuu.com dialogue

Whenever you open a dialogue, the audio will start automatically and the part that is being spoken will be highlighted in yellow, so you can follow the dialogue easily. We recommend you listen to the dialogue as a whole at first. If you then want to hear a specific sentence again, or listen to one sentence at a time, just use the forward and backward buttons to navigate through the dialogue. Try it out now!

dialogue toolbar

Learn at your own pace by listening to each sentence as often as you wish or pausing the dialogue at any time. This way you can develop an ear for the language you are learning and you can also practise your pronunciation by listening to the sentences repeatedly and saying them out loud.

As usual, after listening to the dialogue, you will have to answer three short questions to show that you have understood the conversation. Test your listening comprehension now!

These new functions are part of the busuu.com Premium MembershipPremium Member.

Not a Premium MemberPremium Member yet? Upgrade now to learn languages more efficiently or have a look at the complete list of our Premium functions here!

Have fun with our improved dialogues!