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busuu.com is yet another social network for language learners. It's a start-up based in Madrid and is still in beta. Users can access all content for free at the moment, but there's no indication of how much it might cost when it leaves beta behind.

So what's on offer? Well, busuu.com offers the usual big-hitters: English, Spanish, German, and French.

I have to admit that one of the reasons I'm reviewing this site ahead of so many others in my 'backblog' is because busuu.com is soooooo pretty. It captivated me visually. I wanted to get in and learn more about the site. And busuu.com made that easy.

It's simple to sign up. You're not browbeaten into giving away too much information - just enough to be useful.

Once you're in you've got four main tabs to navigate with:

- home
- friends
- inbox
- busuutalk

The friends, inbox and busuutalk tabs are self explanatory.

On the homepage you can see your friends, online users, recommended units, 'winners' and are prompted to take part in activities. Or you can click a tree (oh go see...it's pretty) to access the 'language garden' of your target language.

Language Garden
The busuu.com language garden lets you add units to your learning journey. You can study up to 5 units at a time. The units are pretty standard e-learning with a five step process to learning:

1 Vocabulary
Here you learn key vocabulary by watching a slideshow with audio and text. Hardly high-tech, but OK.

2 Dialog
Here you listen to an audio file with a transcript of your target language.

Alongside this, you can see and listen to an English translation.

After this, you test your knowledge with three multiple choice questions.

3 Writing
Here you can write a piece of text and submit it for peer review. Text entries are reviewed and rated.

4 Speak
In this section, you can speak to native and fluent speakers. I'm antisocial, so I only checked the feature out for how it looks - I didn't attempt to speak to anyone! Luckily, just looking completed this section for me, so I didn't have to do anything ;)

5 Test
Here's where you'll get a multiple choice picture and sound file quiz - with some very strange audio feedback in the form of cheerful or very ominous piano notes!

THE END
After you've completed a whole unit, it disappears from your learning garden and you can add another unit.

busuu.com - so what works and what doesn't?

The e-learning is not very high-tech. The slideshow method of learning a word and image by viewing and listening to about 20 words at a time doesn't really work for me. Our working memory can grasp about 7 items at a time. I'm not sure how a complete beginner could remember so many words all at one go.

Another problem with this type of picture, text and audio-based learning is that it's hard to tell what some of the images are. I ended up getting answers wrong in the test section just because I couldn't remember which image meant what. You end up trying to associate the images and audio file as much as you try to learn the meaning. It's hard to get around this.

Like a lot of the other sites I've explored busuu.com doesn't really let you practice half enough. It's a quick introduction to language but I don't know that you get to do enough for the new knowledge to be retained.

It doesn't offer one-to-one lessons with qualified teachers.

Verdict?
There's nothing very new here. And there's a lot of competition in this space now. But there's nothing terribly wrong with what's on offer at busuu.com. The site is pretty. It provides decent e-learning. It doesn't force the learner into linear learning, which is great - it's really good to be able to select bite-sized chunks of learning. It seems like a friendly site...a place you could make friends. However, I see busuu.com very much as a support to classroom-based learning. It seemed like a good way to revise or refresh knowledge, to test where you are.

Why are they called Busuu?
Apparently Busuu is a language spoken in Cameroon. A study conducted in the 80s showed that only eight people still spoke this language.