Busuu Onboarding prototype

START

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

Exploring Busuu

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Welcome to Busuu!

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

Unit 03

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

Unit 02

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

Key takeaways

Unit 01

Objectives

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!

Welcome!

01 Explore how Busuu compares to other language apps on the market.02 Explore Busuu's main product features 03 Explore Busuu's Complete and Special courses

In this resource you will...

Objectives

Busuu and its competitors

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

UNIT 01

UNIT 01 | Busuu and its competitors

Free user features

Premium user features

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

Busuu Free vs Premium

UNIT 01 | Busuu and its competitors

Duolingo's features

Babbel's features

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

Busuu's key product features

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

UNIT 02

Checkpoints

Community

Smart review

UNIT 02 | Key product features

Important product features

GRAMMAR

VOCABULARY

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.

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.

UNIT 02 | Key product features

Smart Review

Click here to see example corrections

Click here to see example conversation task

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.

UNIT 02 | Key product features

Community

EXPLORE

VOCABULARY

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.

UNIT 02 | Key product features

Checkpoints

Complete and Special courses

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

UNIT 03

• 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.

Click here to learn more

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.

UNIT 03 | Busuu courses

Complete courses

Japanese

English

Italian

Dutch

French

German

Polish

Russian

Korean

Turkish

Chinese

Arabic

Portuguese

Spanish

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

UNIT 03 | Busuu courses

Special courses

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Key takeaways

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

Summary

Next steps...

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

Congratulations!