Language Apps vs a Real Tutor: What Each Is Actually Good For

This question is usually framed as a fight, and it shouldn’t be. Apps and tutors are good at almost entirely different things, and the learners who get furthest tend to use both — deliberately, for the parts each does well.

We sell lessons, so take the framing with the appropriate pinch of salt. But it would be a bad advert to pretend an app is useless, because if you are doing ten minutes a day on your phone and enjoying it, you are ahead of most people who intend to learn a language.

What apps are genuinely good at

Habit. This is the big one. A streak, a notification and a five-minute session get people to show up daily in a way that a weekly lesson never will on its own. Consistency beats intensity in language learning, and apps are engineered for consistency.

Vocabulary at volume. Spaced repetition — showing you a word just before you forget it — is genuinely effective and genuinely tedious to run by hand. Software does it better than a human could.

Zero friction. No booking, no scheduling, no being seen to make mistakes. For an absolute beginner, or for anyone nervous about speaking, that last point matters more than it sounds.

Cost. Free or a few pounds a month, against the price of a lesson. On vocabulary per pound, nothing competes.

What apps cannot do

Hear you properly. Speech recognition will accept a sentence delivered with the wrong stress, flattened vowels and an English r. It cannot tell you that you sound comprehensible-but-odd, which is the actual problem most learners have.

Notice a pattern. If you have confused por and para the same way for a year, an app will mark each instance wrong and move on. A teacher spots the pattern, works out why you believe what you believe, and fixes the cause.

Let you say something you meant. Translating the bear drinks beer is not communication. The first time you have to explain a delayed train, or disagree politely, you discover that recognising sentences and producing them are different skills.

Handle the awkward middle. Most apps are excellent up to about A2 and thin out badly after that. The B1-to-B2 stretch, where progress slows and nobody tells you what to do next, is precisely where they leave you.

What a tutor is actually for

Not, mostly, explaining grammar. You can read grammar. A tutor is for four things a book and an app cannot provide.

• Correction in real time, on your own sentences, about your own life — the ones you will need again next week.
• Diagnosis. Someone who can tell you that your problem is not vocabulary but that you avoid the past tense, and then build the next hour around it.
• Pressure. The productive discomfort of having to produce language now, at speed, with a person waiting. Nothing else replicates it.
• Accountability. A booked lesson with a human being is much harder to skip than an app notification, which is why many people find one weekly lesson holds the whole habit together.

How to use both

A division of labour that works for most people:

• App, daily, ten minutes. Vocabulary and review. Keep the streak; it is doing real work.
• Input, daily, twenty minutes. A podcast, a series, a song. Free, and the thing most learners under-do.
• Tutor, weekly, one hour. Speaking, correction, and deciding what to work on next.
• Bring the app’s leftovers to the lesson. The words you keep getting wrong, the structure you never understood. That turns a vague conversation hour into a targeted one.

If you can only do one, the answer depends on where you are. Absolute beginner with no budget: the app, without hesitation. Stuck at intermediate, understanding plenty and saying little: the tutor, and it isn’t close.

Vocabulary

• la clase particular — private lesson
• la racha — streak
• el repaso — revision, review
• corregir — to correct
• practicar — to practise
• estancarse — to plateau, to get stuck
• soltarse — to loosen up, to start speaking freely
• me da vergüenza hablar — I’m embarrassed to speak
• llevo un año estudiando — I’ve been studying for a year

Where to go next

A useful test: when did you last say something in your target language that you had not seen written down first? If the honest answer is never, or months ago, the missing ingredient is not more vocabulary.

You don’t have to commit to a course to find out. On Parlazo you can book a single lesson with a native tutor, pay for that lesson, and keep your streak going the next morning regardless.