Adding Busuu into my mix of resources

I was recently going through some old email, and found one from Busuu from when I'd signed up for the service. I'd forgotten that I had an account with them, but I'd signed up with them last year when they introduced Turkish as one of their languages being taught. I'm not sure why I never pursued it, but I forgot about Busuu after I'd created my account.

In any case, I decided to give them another look. I'm glad I did. It's proving to be a good addition to my current resources.

They currently offer English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, Japanese and Chinese as full courses, but you can choose other languages to study, as I'll note later.

I wanted to start at their A2 level course and go from there, but it either wasn't allowed or I wasn't able to figure out how, so I had to go back to the beginner A1 course. It took me about four days to get through the A1 course. It's been a really good refresher, and I picked up some more vocabulary too. I can honestly say it's much more complete than, say, Teach Yourself Turkish, or even FSI. As a non-paying member, I was able to complete 25 lessons from the A1 course, but I think there are 35 lessons in total. The ten lessons that I didn't have access to appear to be mostly grammar-related. That's OK, since A1 is a refresher for me. I've now started on the A2 course. If I were a paying member, I would have access to much more material, including downloadable audio and PDFs of all the lesson material.

I think what probably impresses me most about Busuu though, is the social factor. Sure, there are other sites that offer a social aspect to learning, but I've not seen so much social interaction as I have on Busuu. Lang-8 comes close, but you don't get the camaraderie of shared courses like you do with Busuu. After every single exercise I completed, within seconds I had corrections, encouragement and requests for friendships. The chat and other realtime features are pretty good, and quite useful. I guess I should probably note that Busuu, like any other socially-powered site, has its share of people just looking to hook up. If that's what you're into, fine, but Busuu gives you ways to combat it if you need to, by blocking/reporting as spam, as well as up/down voting in the comments and critiques of your writing exercises.

Knowing that they didn't have any Georgian course, I still specified that I was learning the language. It gave me the option to search for native Georgian speakers and returned pages of users, so that may be an option for lesser spoken language conversation partners.

I can't really comment on the upper lesson levels, since I've just started to use the service in earnest, but if the quality remains as it has with the first course, I'm probably going to spring the €75 for 12 months of premium access.

I highly recommend it as an additional resource!

Using what I can get my hands on

This week, the Norwegian movie of choice was Varg Veum, Bitre Blomster (Bitter Flowers). It's based on a series of detective novels by author Gunnar Staalesen. It was an excellent movie. I like crime stories and the Bergen scenery was stunning. I'd not heard of the author before, but because of this movie I'll now be on the lookout for his novels. And I guess there are plans for more movie adaptations of the Varg Veum series, too.

Being in Northwestern Wisconsin for the last couple months has also given me the opportunity to actually speak Norwegian to a couple people in the area. That's been an unexpected bonus that I'm glad presented itself.

I'm continuing with Czarne Oceany. And I've been listening to Polish radio online, as well as my Polish music collection. Right now I have no local opportunity to speak Polish. I could go the Skype route, but I'm already doing that with Turkish. I generally don't like doing the same thing for more than one language, so I won't be doing Skype for a while for Polish. It is about time I start writing entries in Polish on Lang-8 though. So that's next on my list.

I've now started with the 4th Türkçe Öğreniyoruz course. It's the last in the series that I have, although the series runs through 6 courses. The last two courses are readers, from what I understand, so I'm not sure I'll even bother to hunt those down. I have plenty of other reading material available to me. As a matter of fact, I'm now able to get through a lot of the daily news. I've been using Hürriyet. My vocabulary is increasing fairly rapidly with it and I don't have many problems with grammar. This is helping with my Turkish Skype conversations. We now have a much broader assortment of things to talk about. And speaking of Skype, we've upped the amount of time for each conversation (still twice a week) to 20 minutes.

All in all, I'm much farther along with Turkish than I had planned to be by this time in the year and less than where I had planned to be with Polish. I'm about where I want to be with Norwegian - that is, able to communicate on most any subject that comes up, even if my vocabulary isn't the most elegant.