Busuu Review

Sunday, December 5th

2021 Italian Lesson Reviews

Busuu

• 3 options for Italian courses: Complete (with beginner, intermediate and advanced content), Travel, and Pronunciation
• Free basic membership
• Personalized study plans with Premium Plus membership
• Placement test available
• Certification testing available
• 14-day money-back guarantee on paid plans

What is Busuu? Besides being an endangered language from Cameroon, it's a good language platform for learning Italian (or many other languages). According to an independent study, you'll get the equivalent of a college semester of learning after spending at least 22 hours using Busuu's Premium features. Not bad, wouldn't you agree?

Over 150 Italian lessons across 4 difficulty levels

There's a staggering amount of content available on Busuu's Complete Italian lessons. At the A1 (Absolute Beginner) level alone, you'll have 111 lessons covering topics that start with the usual greetings and introductions, and then progress all the way to office tasks and household chores while introducing past tense verbs. There are a total of four levels of study (A1, A2, B1, B2), allowing you to progress to where you can discuss financial topics, literary genres, cause and effect, and even flirting.

Placement test or choose your own level

Where should you begin? If you've studied Italian before, you can give Busuu's placement test a try when you set up your free account (email address or mobile number required). You can always change your level if you need to. There's a lot you can get for free here, including the complete first lesson for beginners, Ciao!, which includes greetings and introductions.

Costs

• Free for Basic membership
• Premium membership: $9.99/month
• Premium Plus membership: $13.99/month
• Discounts available when you pay for 12 or 24 months in advance

You'll need a paid plan for the most features

But, as you click through further lessons, you'll soon see that many features are locked unless you pay for one of Busuu's two paid memberships, Premium and Premium Plus. For $9.99/month, you'll be able to get unlocked features like offline learning and in-depth grammar lessons. The most perks are at the Plus level for $13.99/month: you can get your Italian mastery certified through tests by McGraw Hill, receive feedback on your spoken and written Italian from native speakers in the Busuu learning community, and have a personalized study plan created for you. Also, a paid plan is necessary if you want to use Busuu to study more than one language at a time. You can save money if you choose to pay for 12 or 24 months in advance. Memberships have a 14-day refund policy and renew automatically at the end of the term unless you cancel ahead of time.

Travel-focused Italian lessons available too

If you're hoping to learn just enough Italian to be a confident traveler, check out Busuu's Italian for Travel course. You can find it by clicking at the top where it says Complete Italian and then selecting the travel course in the dropdown. Why learn how to introduce the members of your family when what you really need to know is how to order an espresso, right? There are 11 total lessons in the Travel course, and you can always switch over to the Complete materials if you want to keep learning later.

How about pronunciation help?

And, for any Italian learners, Busuu's pronunciation course can be helpful. In seven short lessons, you work on vowels, the two sounds of the letter "c" , how to change your intonation to indicate a question, and so on. Both the Travel and Pronunciation courses are similar to Complete: you'll get access to some lessons and features with your no-cost account, but it'll take a membership to use all of them.

Could use more activities to practice speaking Italian

Where we feel Busuu is a little lacking is in opportunities for speaking practice. Even in the pronunciation course, the entire first lesson never asks you to say any of the vowels it's teaching/reviewing. Where most Italian lessons have speech recognition components built in, we never found any of that here. In fact, the only place we found the chance to say anything in Italian and get feedback was in the Social section of our dashboard, where we could respond to prompts like "describe this picture" or "tell about where you live" and wait for a native speaker to comment and/or correct us. On the other hand, some of the language platforms that offer voice recognition are notorious for accepting terrible accents as near-native - or being overly sensitive and failing to count audio samples that most people would say are "good enough" .

A good all-around resource for learning Italian

Busuu is one of a small number of Italian lessons that offers advanced content beyond beginning levels, and the only one we're aware of that lets you get official certification of your fluency. We also like that students can move around through lessons and topics at will, focus their studies just on travel-related vocabulary, and interact with native speakers to get corrections on their spoken and written Italian. Give this service a try with their free basic account and see how it works for you!