Ausflug54 - Let's talk about Busuu!

What in the world is Busuu? Busuu is a language learning app aimed at beginner to intermediate students. Let's talk about the pros and cons of this app, and whether or not you should consider using it in your language learning efforts!
00:00 Intro
01:43 Free vs paid
02:29 Web vs mobile
06:01 Course offerings
07:06 Phrases vs syntax
08:58 Politics
10:47 User forums
11:29 Weekly challenges
15:10 Who is Alberto?
15:50 The verdict
17:44 Advanced students
18:34 Summary and outro

[@pjmmccann]

I put in a few months on Busuu, off and on over the course of a year or so, but didn't bother renewing it when it ran out. The best aspect, by a country mile, is the checking of your work by "native speakers". Why the scare quotes? Because there is (or at least was: I'm talking about 2020/2021 here) a huge amount of variance in the language abilities of those who are making corrections. As a (bona fide!) native English speaker it was sometimes a little scary seeing the lack of quality in some of the responses to an English learner's submission. Essentially: if it can happen in English, then what guarantee is there for those correcting German? The best thing, in my experience, is to latch onto someone - - or a few people - - who you learn to really trust, and to carefully cultivate their help/friendship.
On more general matters: I recall that the actual lessons felt quite anaemic, being restricted to using the "fill in the gaps"/"arrange these words into a sentence"/"choose the right pronoun"/"memorise a handful of related words" patterns, which weren't very stimulating for me. [[[The switch towards this type of nonsense is also one of my pet peeves with the modern version of Duolingo. Sigh... I totally understand the practicalities involved, but regularly lament the loss of flexibility.]]] In some sense I think the two "arms" of Busuu are too distant from one another: the regular exercises are way too constrained, and don't demonstrate or encourage any creativity or flexibility in the language, while the free-form "Write a paragraph and have it corrected" are too *lacking* in constraints: that blank text field can be really, really demotivating sometimes, as you contemplate how to "talk about the sights of your city" for the 17th occasion.
Finally, on Busuu, the grammar lessons before the main problems weren't actually bad, but there was not really anything there that 2 minutes work with Google and Stack Exchange wouldn't have matched (or bettered).
On the question of politics in language learning apps, I'd have to say that I'm pretty neutral, unless it gets overwhelmingly forced and facile. I *do* want to be able to talk about climate change, immigration, varying family structures, cultural differences and so forth, but I don't want 20 sentences making me repeat that "Die Arbeitslose sind nicht faul, sie suchen jeden Tag nach Arbeit", using 10 different sentence structures. Maybe short dialogues are a more helpful form for such topics (and/or reading/listening to something like "Langsam Gesprochene Nachrichten" from DW.)

[@LernenundFahren]

Great points, and I agree with almost everything you've written here. My feeling is that if you're very active in the exercise section on Busuu, both by submitting your own exercises, and also by helping to correct the work of others, you will gradually over time get to know some of the regular users, and then you can specifically call on those people to correct your work, because you trust their ability to do so. I do agree that sometimes you see corrections offered by people who themselves don't seem to have a strong sense of the rules of the language, but that's what you occasionally get when you allow anyone to correct anything.
Where I think we disagree a little is that I find the blank text field to be quite freeing rather than intimidating. "Talk about the sights of your city", you say? Okay, today I live in Moscow and I'm going to talk about Russian architecture. Tomorrow I live in Jakarta and I'm going to talk about active volcanoes. The day after that, I live on one of the moons of Mars and I'm going to describe the view in great detail. Perhaps it's just because I love writing in any language, but if you give me a blank text field every day, I guarantee that I will fill it with something, even if it's made-up nonsense! 😃 I would in fact say that that has been my favourite part of using Busuu.

[@pjmmccann]

@@LernenundFahren Yep, good point about the free-form fields. I was probably looking at excuses for my inner laziness (and sense of boredom with the app more generally) rather than viewing it as an opportunity to tango for a while in a fictive setting. And if I'm being honest, I think the dreaded *perfectionism*, that ongoing pest that infects a lot of language learners, also affected me with those writing drills. That is, instead of "just writing", I was frequently trying to write with as few errors as possible (externally checking expressions, etc), to correspond to some sort of fantasy language level that I was projecting. Silly, and clearly counterproductive, but somewhat difficult to back out of once you're parked there!