In the week that Livemocha was swallowed up, Busuu has announced that it has now reached 30m users, with a growth rate of 40,000 a day. It’s not clear how of those are active users, though. Their main growth is coming from countries like Brazil, Turkey and Russia – the same group of countries that most ELT publishers see as the source of their own growth.
Busuu offers online learning, plus a range of apps for young learners.
We’ll have a proper look at the Busuu service soon. In the meantime, here’s what how they describe themselves:
busuu.com is an innovative online community for learning languages.
We have personally suffered from the traditional way to learn a new language which we always found expensive, difficult and boring.
Therefore, we decided to create a new concept of language learning by offering you the following advantages:
- Learn from native speakers: Learn directly from native speakers of the busuu.com community via our integrated video-chat application! By doing so you can practice your language skills in a live conversation.
- Learn with our material: We have prepared over 150 learning units covering diverse topic areas and grammar units covering the most important grammar points! The content is image and sound-based.
- Learn for free: busuu.com can be used completely for free! However, you have the option to pay a minimal monthly fee to become a Premium Member. With that Premium Membership you gain access to additional functionalities and more material.