busuu.com is Europe’s largest online community for learning languages. The website was launched in May 2008 and by October 2011 it had reached 5,000,000 registered users from over 200 different countries.

The users can access audio-visual language courses in currently 10 languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Polish and Arabic). They can practice their language skills with native speakers of the community via an integrated video-chat application and peer-to-peer text corrections.

In addition to the regular language courses, in September 2011 busuu.com launched a Business English Course with words and key phrases used in typical business situations. In October 2011, a Business Spanish Course followed and other business language courses will follow in the near future.

The website partners with Collins and PONS (part of the publishing house Klett Group, one of Europe’s largest providers of educational services and material) to offer grammar resources to its users. Additionally, users can access daily updated news articles from The Guardian with an integrated dictionary functionality provided by MacMillan.

busuu.com launched iPhone/iPad applications in September 2010 and in 2011 the apps won the “Stiftung Warentest” for Best Mobile English Vocabulary Trainer. In August 2011, busuu.com also launched Android applications. Both apps are available in all nine languages offered on the website and in total they have been downloaded over 4 million times.

busuu.com was an official project of UNESCO’s International Year of Languages in 2008. The website has received several awards including AlwaysOn Global 250 Winner 2009, Language Label 2009 from the European Commission, CeBIT Innovation Award 2010, Red Herring European Winner 2010, and won the category ‘Best Education, Recruitment, Media Startup’ at the Europas TechCrunch Awards in 2011.