Busuu: Language Learning

Coming from someone who’s used Duolingo on and off for about as long as it’s existed, and seen its system change time and again over the years, I feel that Busuu’s system has a focus on certain essential ideas of what it means to learn a language that Duolingo has historically struggled with. I’ve been impressed with Busuu has crafted exercises which prioritize the meanings behind words rather than just translating back and forth, and how the community feature directs students to actually express thoughts of their own in the language they’re learning. These are things that the base loop of Duolingo typically fails to integrate, and that new features, only presently available in particular Duolingo courses, have only begun to address. The monetization scheme of Busuu is also something I appreciate, in that there are meaningful features you can get with a subscription, but what you get for free (with ads, to be clear) still feels like a complete and healthy product, and it doesn’t feel like I’m being pushed unnecessarily hard to buy a subscription: this is also something which has frustrated me with Duolingo in recent years, even though free Duolingo is still entirely complete, there are a lot of factors which push very hard in the direction of a subscription. I still use both apps, but Busuu is the one which keeps me better engaged with actually learning a language, and it is the one I would recommend to someone learning a language it supports.

Hello, I just found this app about a month ago, but I didn’t really interact with it till about 1 week ago when I allowed the notifications to appear. Once I started getting daily reminders and started following the lesson plan, my language ability (Chinese) quadrupled. I had been watching Chinese drama’s with English subtitles for about 5 months to get use to the different sounds/tones. I could recognize a few words just from repetition, but if the subtitles were not correct it was useless. After downloading several apps that offered Korean (also learning) and Chinese I found this was the best one for me. The lesson plans are straightforward and with the way it’s set up it really makes it easy to learn. In addition to the lessons, you can make flash cards to practice your vocabulary/learned sentences, practice your writing in pinyin or hanzi. You are also able to retake lessons or quizzes to help you refresh, as much as you want. I’m only in chapter 4 of 14 for Mandarin beginners, but I have already learned a lot. I can recognize and understand many sentences in my Chinese drama’s, I can point out and understand some of the hanzi if I am using Chinese/Mandarin subtitles for English speaking shows, etc. I decided to upgrade to premium after using the free version for a week (wanted to support the app makers) and hope to continue progressing rapidly. If looking for a language app I would highly recommend this one!

I joined last month and have already finished one level of French, which was a review since I had taken French in high school. I love that the platform is collaborative and native speakers in the language you want to learn correct your errors and you can help & correct those trying to learn your native language. Very cool. And there is a nice mix between written and spoken lesson options. I’ve tried several language apps and this one is my favorite! There are definitely some glitches that need to be resolved. The scoring is odd and you get double points than expected with reviews of flash cards. And it is not intuitive that you need to remove vocab words from your vocabulary list to not have them continually repeated in your quizzes and to generate different flash card quizzes. And the test I took for French A1 was odd. There was more fast spoken French than there was through all the lessons. Thankfully, there is an option to slow it down. It seems like there should be more fast spoken French in the lessons, if that’s how you will be tested. Also, there was vocabulary in the test that wasn’t taught, or if it was, it was just in passing. It seems like those words should be included. Also, I wasn’t able to take the test on the app - and that wasn’t really clearly indicted in the app. But overall, it is one of the better language learning platforms I’ve used and I like that features keep being added.