PONS Publishing Group partners with web 2.0 community busuu.com

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The leading online community for learning languages busuu.com integrates PONS language learning material within the existing language courses

Madrid, 20th of January 2010 – Busuu.com offers language learning material of the renowned PONS Publishing Group to its more than 250,000 users. The PONS material is integrated completely interactively within the existing learning platform.
busuu.com (http://www.busuu.com) represents an innovative form of language learning. Users have free access to interactive language learning material in currently five different languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian and German). Additionally, users improve their language skills directly with other native speakers of the community via an integrated video-chat.

The Start-Up was founded at the beginning of 2008 in Madrid and has currently more than 250,000 registered users from over 200 different countries.

For more than 30 years, PONS Publishing Group develops language courses and dictionaries for all different needs: for schools, for the professional life, for travelling or simply for pleasure. PONS offers more than 500 dictionaries and language courses in 35 different languages – from Chinese to Hungarian. As everybody learns in a different way, PONS provides a broad range of classical dictionaries, language courses, audio-books and a free online portal www.pons.eu with digital dictionaries in 8 different languages and complete grammar explanations. PONS belongs to the Klett Group, the second biggest publisher in Germany.

The integration of PONS material within busuu.com is just the beginning of the partnership between the young Web 2.0 Start-Up and the prestigious German publishing house. Additional material in other languages as well as business courses will follow in the near future.

“The PONS material perfectly complements our existing language learning offer” says Bernhard Niesner, one of the Co-Founders of busuu.com. “We are very pleased to join forces with such an innovative partner with a tremendous expertise in language learning”.

„We are impressed by the interactive language learning approach of busuu.com. The integration of our material into this Web 2.0 environment extends the current offer of PONS and gives us access to new target groups” points out Gabriele Schmidt, Director of PONS.

About busuu.com
busuu.com (http://www.busuu.com) is a free online community for learning languages. Users have access to audio-visual learning material covering more than 150 different day-to-day topics. Additionally, language skills can be directly improved together with native speakers from around the world. Users connect via an integrated video-chat with other native speakers of the community to practice their conversational skills. Each user is not only a “student” of a foreign language but also a “tutor” of his own mother tongue.
The start-up was founded in Madrid at the beginning of 2008 and has currently more than 250,000 users from over 200 different countries.
The name of the site comes from the Busuu language of Cameroon, which according to an ethnological study from the 80s is only spoken by 8 people.