Learning Spanish is just one of those endeavors that become several times more fun and inspiring when done with friends. Learning anything, let alone a foreign tongue, is not something one would find terribly engaging if done in isolation. Luckily for our generation, we are spoilt for choice when it comes to collaborative learning. With the social media becoming as integral to our lives as breakfast and TV, it’s impossible for even the most hopeless of loners to stay isolated these days. Here, we’re going to review two services that mix social networking and language learning to bring you the best of two very disjoint worlds. So, let the showdown begin!
Lang-8®: You scratch my back, I scratch yours
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Its interface borders on ugly but Lang-8® packs quite a punch
Photo credit and copyright: Lang-8® |
Broadly speaking,
Lang-8® functions as an enormous Internet-mediated discussion board where “comments” are posted for subsequent correction by the site’s users. One could easily treat this service as a special interest blogging platform the special-interest being language-learning. Here, this feature is known as the “journal” and you’re free to write whatever you feel like in yours. The idea is simple: You pick a topic and write about it as an entry in your journal, in the language you’re learning. Once you submit, your entry is open to reviews and corrections bu the rest of the community. So, say you’re learning Spanish and you speak English. You write articles in Spanish which will then be corrected by someone who speaks Spanish and is learning English. You can return the favor by corrcting stuff for those learning English. This simple synergy is extremely powerful and has helped millions of language students around the world improve their writing. Your entries can be as long as your patience but the longer it gets, the fewer correction it attracts and it’s easy to see why. Ideally, you should also add an English version of what you’ve written so the person reviewing can make sense of what you’re trying to say in case errors make you that incomprehensible in Spanish (trust me, that happens!).
Lang-8
® is not just about correcting each other. It’s also grown into a massive platform for reaching out to people with complementing language goals. Here, you can sieve through the myriad forums and make friends with, say, native Spanish speakers who are looking for help with their English. Several forums have threads where people exchange Skype IDs so as to connect with fellow language learners and practice speech. You can also directly add someone as a friend and message them asking if they’d like to have a voice chat for language exchange. The opportunities are frankly endless. And all of this costs you a neat $0.
Busuu®: Back-scratching with bells ‘n’ whistles
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Busuu® offers courses that would serve absolute beginners at best
Photo credit and copyright: Busuu® |
Busuu® is a slightly different beast. To begin with, it looks way sexier than Lang-8
® right off the bat. It also offers way more stuff for language learners than mere socializing. On this site, you have courses you can take, both free and paid. There’s also vocabulary lists which is kind of useful if you’re an absolute beginner. Words are presented both in isolation as well as in context which is very crucial for getting a feel of how a language works. However, most of this grammar and vocabulary free-ride lasts only the first week of your signing up. Beyond that, you’ve got to pay up to continue enjoying it. And that sucks because the courses are far from a value-for-money proposition at any price point. Nobody has ever learned a language relying solely on lazy translations of stalk phrases and redundant flashcards. Don’t get me wrong, flashcards are very useful when it comes to memorizing stuff and building vocabulary. But basing an entire learning experience solely on them? That’s a recipe for failure and frankly speaking a very lazy approach.
Once you’re done with a course, you can also take tests to review what you just learned and the tests are incredibly horrible. They are easy to cheat and largely irrelevant to the course they’re reviewing. Imagine being tested not on the grammar but a subject’s name from the comprehension snippet! How is that helping one’s language? The courses are repetitive, tedious, inefficient, and dead beat boring. They lack character if you know what I mean.
Where Busuu
® does shine, however, is its collaborative learning aspect. This is very similar to what Lang-8
® does and, in my experience, does so slightly better. Just as on Lang-8
®, one can post entries in the target language and receive corrections from the audience. Just as on Lang-8
®, one is encouraged to return the favor by offering corrections to those writing in the language one speaks. I found that reviews were marginally quicker to come by on Busuu
® than on Lang-8
® but that could be mere fluke. Busuu
® also offers a chat platform where you can catch up with fellow language learners for a more personal language exchange although most would prefer to move elsewhere (such as Skype or Yahoo) after the first chat because the interface isn’t very accent-friendly.
Conclusion
To conclude this cursory review, I’d say both have their strong points and are almost equally good for an independent learner. Seek out friends, collaborate, make mistakes, learn – if that’s your mantra, neither would disappoint you. Just don’t bother with the “courses” Busuu
® offers as they are as effective as cheap travel phrasebooks if your goal is to actually learn Spanish beyond
hola and
buenos días. Just use them to find friends and practice writing and you’ll be good. An insane amount of practice is what you must always be gunning for if you’re any bit serious about nailing Spanish for real life.
Memorizing stock phrases off a cookie-cutter list, no matter how attractive the proposition, is not the key to success when it comes to language learning. At best, this would help you sound like a lost tourist who can‘t communicate to save his life. Hence, the takeaway here is that both these services are awesome as long as you know what to do with them. Just stick to collaborating with fellow learners and you‘ll get the maximum juice for the squeeze.
In an ever-changing world of online learning, this review might not stay this accurate forever and features might change overnight. Got any experience with either of the two? Do share it with us and the rest in the comments section. Tried any other free service and found them fun? We’re all ears. Remember, it’s bad karma to keep stuff like this to yourself!
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