I am genuinely impressed with how good the app Busuu is (for French at least). My comprehensive review below:

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PERSONAL LANGUAGE HISTORY:

I’m a Spanish major and had to take two semesters of French. I would say that by the end, I was a very strong A1. I then went about 8 months without any classes or learning, just barely maintaining my knowledge with the occasional weekend language binge. After using Busuu for the past three months (supplemented with almost daily French podcasts, reading, and film viewing), I feel confident that I am a light-middle A2. I haven’t seen a lot of talk about this app, so I’m gonna begin. Feel free to refute or support in the comments below.

INTRO:

So, one of the best pieces of advice you can give to a new language learner is to pick an acclaimed course and follow it to completion. Usually these are textbooks or other sorts of grammar books, which have a tendency to not be as engaging as gamified apps, but are almost always more valuable. And a prevalent mistake we see beginners make is they just attach themselves to an app like Duolingo and wonder why they can’t really speak a lick of their target language.

Well in my eyes, Busuu overcomes both the mundanity (and the difficulty of self pacing) of a text resource and the poor structure of pretty almost all online apps. I’m gonna list some pros and cons:

PROS:

  • Realistic goal setting: For goal setting, you choose how many minutes you would like to spend on Busuu each day. I personally do 15, which combined with other resources gives me about 30-60 minutes a day on French. 15 minutes a day also lends itself well to the pacing of the course

  • Well paced course: The pacing of the course is really outstanding. It builds grammatically on previous concepts in a way that is very smooth. I would say that with an appropriate daily goal (I think 10-20 minutes per day is best), you are constantly in the sweet spot of learning new grammar/vocab while not being overloaded with new concepts every day.

  • Good structure: Not sure what else to call this, but let me explain. The whole Complete French course is comprised of 4 different parts (A1, A2, B1, B2). At first, I thought this was a bit tacky, but upon analyzing the topics covered in all parts (I’m about halfway through A2), I think the concepts in each part correspond very well with their CEFR levels. Now, completion of a part alone obviously doesn’t mean you are at that level, but I think if you have been using outside supplements and intently doing the lessons, you’ll find that there’s a heavy correlation.

  • 4 different courses: There’s a complete French course, a travel course, a business course, and a pronunciation course. Possible caveat: the pronunciation lessons are included in the complete course as well as some of the travel lessons I would imagine. The business course looks very distinct from any lessons in the complete course.

  • Correction from native speakers: At the end of many lessons, you will be prompted to put what you just learned into either speech or writing. For example, today I learned vocabulary referring to areas of the house, so my prompt was to describe my house. After you complete the prompt, you send it out into the community and a native speaker corrects it. I have found that I usually get a correction within thirty minutes, if not sooner.

  • Lessons have much variety: There is a healthy balance of input and output which I think already puts this app above others. There are also many ‘question’ types: testing your comprehension of a video, being prompted to translate both from and to the target language, matching, fill in the blank, repeating through a mic, etc.

  • Gives notes about informal/spoken French: This is a huge plus for me so that I can avoid sounding like a textbook and having trouble understanding shows. You will even learn such things as French interjections, swear words, and contractions.

  • The recordings they have are great: clear native speakers and not jumbled stitches of different recordings.

  • Interface/layout is well organized and clean

CONS:

  • Doesn’t use native speakers nearly as much as it markets itself: Busuu’s ‘thing’ is that it allows you to learn from native speakers. This is just absolutely BS. Aside from the corrections, there is nothing else. Recently I’ve seen that they have a little tutor service through their app (think italki), but it looks expensive so you’re better off with italki. This being said, I don’t knock the app because I never really expected to use this app for native speakers. I plan to start weekly italki lessons within the next couple months instead.

  • Not as ‘gamified’ as some people might like: Yeah, I don’t have a problem with this because all I want from an app in terms of gamification is just the ability to achieve goals and have it feel like I’m completing a level, and Busuu does that excellently. But if you want XP and little animations and competition (à la Duolingo) then you’re out of luck.

  • There’s a grammar/vocab tab and it’s just not Busuu’s forte. It’s not bad, it’s just not that good. And if you’re the type of person who wants to keep everything up to date and clean, it might start to annoy you. If you really want flashcards, I recommend Anki obviously.

CONCLUSION:

So I fell in love with language learning about 7 years ago through Duolingo. It made language learning fun and accessible. For this reason, I have a sweet spot for Duo even though it is pretty much a large waste of time. All the Duo hate over the years made me think an app could never be a main resource for learning, and only ever a supplement. Busuu has broken that idea for me and I give it 4.5 stars out of 5. I highly recommend for anyone.

Apologies for grammatical or formatting errors (typed in a frenzy on mobile)

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