Busuu Review: Korean Lessons

Busuu, named after an endangered language from Cameroon, emerged from the frustration Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti experienced with traditional language learning methods during their MBA studies at IE Business School in Spain. Recognizing the outdated, expensive, and time-consuming nature of existing options, they conceived Busuu as a solution to offer affordable online courses and interactions with native speakers. Launched in 2008 after their graduation, Busuu swiftly gained recognition as a leading player in language education. In January 2022, Busuu joined forces with Chegg, aligning with their shared commitment to empowering learners in their academic pursuits and beyond.

Get started for free with Complete Korean

It's free to get started with Busuu. There are three Korean courses you can choose from:

• Complete Korean (beginner levels A1-A2)
• Hangeul (beginner level A1) : strictly for learning to read and write in Korean
• K-Drama (beginner level A1): learn the language through a TV program

However, only the Complete Korean course can be accessed at no cost. The other two sets of lessons will show you the first one in each series, but the rest will require a Premium plan on Busuu.

Free option is ad-supported

But, before we get down to dollars, let's look at what you can do for free on Busuu. You'll start out with the absolute basics of introductions and saying hello. No problem. Learn to say "hello" and at the end you'll be rewarded with some stars to show your progress. Busuu gives you daily challenges, so if you like having incentives like trophies and streaks to work through lessons, this platform has you covered.

Online tracker

It also lets you know how long it'll take you to complete your studies at your current pace; for example, after the first lesson, Busuu told us it would take us 66 days to complete Beginner (A1) Korean, which would allow us to introduce ourselves, order meals, have basic conversations, and fill out forms with personal information (exactly what you might need to know to start functioning in the language on a daily basis). As you work your way through the free platform, expect to have ads at the end of every single lesson, and sometimes before you move on to the next one.

Pass a level to move forward

By the way, Busuu doesn't let you skip around content-wise: you'll have to either progress through each lesson in a chapter, or if you already feel confident in your Korean skills for a particular topic, you can jump to the chapter-end checkpoint and see if you know enough (80% or better) to move to the next one.

Premium plan gets rid of ads and gives you more features

Once you get through that first lesson, Busuu jumps right to the subscription pitch, so we might as well too. You can keep using the free version of Busuu; just expect to have to click "not now" and "maybe later" a bunch of times. The Premium plan (with benefits like ad-free use, all lessons unlocked, spaced-repetition practice tools, personalized grammar review, completion certificates, monthly streak repair, and priority feedback from native Korean speakers) can be accessed for $13.90/month on a month-to-month plan. There's no free trial, but you can cancel at any time. If you want to take a chance on Busuu and you're willing to pay upfront for several months in advance, a 6-month plan is $50.70, and a one-year plan is $83.40. Those two tiers come with a 7-day free trial, so you can really put these Korean lessons to the test (and maybe take a peek at that K-Drama course that's Premium-only).

You won't be writing in Korean right away

The beginning lessons on Busuu are extremely basic, and we were torn between loving the fact that there were English approximations for all of the phrases (so we could wrap our heads around what we were trying to imitate) and disliking the fact that our first opportunity to produce something in Korean and send it to the community (a simple "My name is") used the English approximation with no opportunity to try it using the actual Korean alphabet. Busuu probably doesn't want to overwhelm anyone by jumping right into Hangeul, but it left us feeling a little... sad? But, we're glad that there are 13 chapters to work through in the A1 Beginner level of Complete Korean, even though we doubt we'd actually have that level of fluency by the time we finished.

Community connections are encouraged but optional

Because community language connections are important on Busuu, you'll be asked to befriend Korean speakers. That's so you can get corrections on your work, practice, and also help them to practice their English (by offering corrections on their assignments). That part is optional, though.

Hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings

Busuu can also be used very easily as an app, and users on both platforms leave enthusiastic feedback for the platform as a whole. On Google Play alone, there were almost 700,000 ratings (!) at the time of this evaluation, averaging a truly impressive average of 4.7 stars. It's not quite as popular on the Apple App Store, but it still averages that 4.7 across 80,000+ reviews. Those who use it as a paid app are sometimes less enthusiastic than students who use Busuu for free, partly due to problems with automatic plan renewals (which don't come with a refund, even if it's just because you forgot to cancel prior to the renewal date). But, by and large, language students (and even some who specifically mentioned learning Korean) often say that Busuu is their favorite free-with-ads learning platform.

Stress-free Korean lessons

While Busuu can't take you to an intermediate or advanced level of fluency in Korean, it's a great way to get started as a beginner or as a student with a bit of prior experience with the language. The lessons are bite-sized and easy to understand; we never felt stressed out as we worked our way through them, unlike some of Busuu's rivals on our list. It's 100% risk-free to give it a try, and we encourage you to see if the Korean lessons at Busuu are the right fit for you.

Learn More  ➜

On the Busuu website