Busuu is a social network to learn languages (it’s possible to learn Spanish, English, French and German at present) with a very clean and easy to use interface.
This Web page is totally free and after the registration process and selecting your native language and the language(s) that you want to learn you can begin using it.
What can you do in Busuu.com?
One of the very first things would be to select some of the available units about different topics (About me, Daily life, free time…) that will allow you to practice different skills of your English. Every unit is made up of five sections:
- Vocabulary: the image-word association that speeds up the learning is used. You can also see a sentence where the new word is used in context.
- Dialogue: an English conversation is presented and then there are a couple of questions about the dialogue in order to test your comprehension.
- Writing: a variety of images is shown (the same images that were used in the Vocabulary section) and you have to describe what you see in the different images.
- Talking: you can make contact with an English native speaker that uses Busuu and practice the new vocabulary that you have just learned.
- Review: you have to do a small exam to evaluate what you have learned.
As a social network, Busuu.com promotes collaboration and interaction with other members. You’ll be able to chat, talk, review exercises of other members and make new friends.
Something attractive about Busuu is the section called “My busuu.com language garden”. It’s an interactive image that represents your knowledge of the languages. You’ll see that for your native language/s you have a large tree, whereas for the languages that you are learning, the trees are small and are subject to a process of growth. By completing the units and showing that you are learning, these trees will increase in size. Moreover, if you show effort and willpower, you’ll get “presents” for you garden, such as dogs, rains … However, if you give up learning the language, the tree will reduce in size once more.
You can see that my “English tree” is pretty stunted and I have to practice to make it grow.
As matter of interest, we would point out that Busuu is a spoken language in Cameroon – according to ethnologic study carried out in the eighties, only eight people are able to speak that language.
Busuu.com is a social network to learn languages focused to users with basic or intermediate level of English. If you are an advanced user you might not find it interesting.
There is a video in YouTube with a tour about this online resource:
Visit Busuu.com
Last comments: If you are looking for more social networks similar to Busuu, don’t hesitate to have a look to our section about social networks and especially to Livemocha (both websites have a similar style). If you are interested in improving your English and have a basic level of English, you can use our guides to learn English from scratch and get some useful advices and free resources to help you.
