Busuu Onboarding prototype

Exploring Busuu

Get to know the key features of Busuu, what languages we teach and how we structure our courses and lessons.

START

Welcome to Busuu!

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Welcome!

In this resource you’ll explore some of the key product features we offer at Busuu and see how Busuu compares to some other language apps on the market.You'll also dive deeper into our courses and explore the different exercise types that we use to build Busuu lessons!

Objectives

Unit 01

Key takeaways

Explore how Busuu compares to other language apps on the marketplace such as Duolingo and Babbel.

Unit 02

Explore some of Busuu's key product features such as Smart review, Community and Checkpoints.

Unit 03

Explore our Complete and Specialist courses for the different languages we teach.

Objectives

In this resource you will...

01 Explore how Busuu compares to other language apps on the market.02 Explore Busuu's main product features03 Explore Busuu's Complete and Special courses

UNIT 01

Explore how Busuu compares to other language apps on the marketplace such as Duolingo and Babbel.

Busuu and its competitors

Busuu Free vs Premium

What's the difference between a free and premium user?

Premium user features

Free user features

UNIT 01 | Busuu and its competitors

Busuu Premium user features

• Learn more than one language
• Access more content immediately
• Learn offline
• Receive corrections faster
• No adverts
• Personalised Smart review feature
• End of level Certificates

Busuu Free user features

• Learn one language
• Some content is locked
• Can't learn offline
• Watch adverts to unlock content

Watch the videos and hover over each competitor’s name to see how they compare to Busuu.

Babbel's features

Duolingo's features

UNIT 01 | Busuu and its competitors

Babbel main features

• 14 languages
• short lessons (all skills)
• practice drills
• speech recognition (all platforms)
• immediate feedback
• daily review (different modes)
• heavy on grammar

Duolingo main features

• 37 languages
• short lessons (all skills)
• practice drills
• speech recognition (all platforms)
• no video or humans - animation only
• Slightly odd sentences
• light on grammar
• Stories and podcast

UNIT 02

Explore some of Busuu's key product features such as "Smart review", "Community" and checkpoint assessments.

Busuu's key product features

Important product features

UNIT 02 | Key product features

Smart review

Community

Checkpoints

Smart Review

UNIT 02 | Key product features

We'll look at this feature in more depth later, but for now, it's just important to understand what it is and it works.

Smart review is a premium feature which enables us to personalise the learning experience. Busuu uses machine learning to help review the new grammar and vocabulary just as it's about to be forgotten or the learner's knowledge decays.

VOCABULARY

GRAMMAR

Vocabulary review is currently available to premium users only on all platforms iOS, Android and Web.

Grammar review is currently available to premium users only on all platforms iOS and Android. It will soon be available to Web users. Available the following languages: Japanese, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch and German.

Grammar review With Grammar Review, learners may revise grammar topics they’ve learned in their course. Once learners have completed lessons that are linked to a certain Grammar Topic, that topic becomes “unlocked” and the learner can practice it in the Grammar Review section. When a user completes a grammar lesson on Busuu, it unlocks a corresponding "grammar topic" in the grammar review tab of Smart review. This is a series of tips for reference and a bank of 40-50 exercises (entities) to help the user practice the grammar. As time goes by, learners are prone to forget those entities if they don’t review them enough. The underlying Smart Review engine assigns a recall strength rating to each entity based on past review frequency and historical success going through exercises involving those entities. By doing that, learners can effectively review the entities more likely to be forgotten.

Vocabulary Review Busuu lessons can have "Flashcards" to teach the user words and set phrases. After the user first meets them, the phrases will appear in the vocabulary review and users practice these using the following exercises:

• Translation: being given the Interface language and then having to produce the course language.
• Dictation: They hear the course language audio and must translate into their interface language.

Community

UNIT 02 | Key product features

All users are part of the Busuu Community, and they interact with this feature in different ways.They can receive feedback on their language skills from people who speak their target langauge in the community.They can also give back to the Community by correcting other learners' submissions.

Click here to see example conversation task

Click here to see example corrections

Checkpoints

UNIT 02 | Key product features

A checkpoint assessment is a set of exercises that test the content in the preceding chapter. It is built to be challenging, engaging, and a thorough test of the chapter. Passing 80% of the checkpoint unlocks the content of the next chapter.

VOCABULARY

EXPLORE

UNIT 03

Explore our Complete and Specialist courses for the different languages we teach.

Complete and Special courses

Complete courses

UNIT 03 | Busuu courses

We offer a "Complete course" for each of the 14 languages that we teach on Busuu, but some courses are notably more "complete" than others.

Click here to learn more

• Content is mapped onto the CEFR (Common European Framework Reference)
• Not all Complete courses have higher level content (B2, C1+).
• Some languages offer video content in these, others do not.
• Each CEFR level is organised by chapters. These chapters correspond to topics in our syllabus documents, but are not visible to the learner.
• We offer different lesson types: Vocabulary, Grammar, Reading, Listening, Speaking and Review lesson types.
• Lessons at the beginning chapters of each level are much shorter and simpler than lessons in later chapters.

Special courses

UNIT 03 | Busuu courses

In addition to our "Complete courses", we have a range of Special courses available for different languages. Click on the flags to explore.

Spanish

Portuguese

Arabic

Chinese

Turkish

Korean

Russian

Polish

German

French

Dutch

Italian

English

Japanese

• Learn Spanish with El País
• Spanish for Travel
• Spanish for Travel (LatAm)
• AP course (pre-university)
• Complete Latin American Spanish.

• Russian for travel
• The Russian Alphabet

• Turkish for travel

• Portuguese for Travel

• Polish for Travel

• K-Drama course
• Hangeul (Korean alphabet)

• Japanese for Travel
• Kanji
• Hiragana
• Manga
• Katakana

• Italian Pronunciation
• Italian for Travel

• German for Travel
• German Pronunciation
• Life in Germany

• French for Travel
• Inclusive French
• French Pronunciation

• London Central Drama series
• English Pronunciation
• The Economist (reading skills)
• The World in English (New York Times videos)
• English for Academic Studies

• Dutch for Business
• Dutch Pronunciation

• Chinese for Travel
• Chinese characters

• Arabic for travel

Summary

Let's recap some of the key points from this lesson on Busuu as a product.

Key takeaways

Busuu's approach sits somewhere between the ultra-gamified Duolingo, and the more grammar-heavy Babbel. It's unique selling point is its Community feature.

There are 3 product features that affect learning design: Smart review (premium), Community, and Checkpoints. We will learn more about these later in the course. All three features enable us to personalise the learning experience for our users.

Premium users can access more content, learn offline, get faster corrections from the Community, access Smart review to train their weak grammar and vocabulary knowledge and learn more than one language.

We offer Complete courses for all 14 languages, but these courses are not all built to the same degree. Complete courses are mapped onto the CEFR as much as possible, but some are more complete than others.

We offer a range of different "Special courses" in all languages, but these are individual. These are labelled by CEFR level so users can find the most interesting content for them.

Congratulations!

Congratulations for completing this lesson! We hope you have a better understanding of Busuu as a product, its key features and competitors.For the next 30 mins open the Busuu app and explore some of the Complete and Special courses we met in Unit 3 and note down your observations.

• Try a completely new language
• Try a course in a language you already speak well

Next steps...