On the practice that has shaped my speaking ability more than any other — and the platform I now recommend.
There is another form of language practice that I have been doing for many years now, alongside the reading-and-listening work I have written about elsewhere, that I have come to consider one of the most useful things I do in my ongoing relationship with the languages I am learning. It is not the most glamorous practice. It does not produce the dramatic before-and-after transformations that language learning content sometimes promises. But it has been, in my experience, the practice that has shaped my speaking ability more than any other — and it is also the practice that has shaped, in small ways, my understanding of what it means to be a serious learner of a language across the long stretches of years that serious learning actually requires.
I am talking about regular conversation lessons with native speakers, conducted online, through one of the platforms that have made this kind of arrangement possible at scale.
I started, some years ago, with a tutor I found on a platform whose name I no longer recall. I have continued, through the various transitions of those years, with a series of tutors on what is now my preferred platform — italki — where I currently work with a small, stable group of teachers in three of the languages I am actively maintaining. The arrangement is simple. Once a week, sometimes twice, I open my laptop, log into the scheduled lesson, and spend an hour or so in conversation with a native speaker who has agreed, for a modest fee, to talk with me in their language. Some of these conversations are structured around grammar points or vocabulary themes. Most of them are simply conversation — about the news, about books we have read, about whatever happens to come up between two adults who know each other a little and have taken the time to talk.
What I want to say in this piece is something about why this practice has come to matter so much to me, and why I now recommend it more strongly than almost any other form of language work to learners who ask me what they should do to maintain or deepen their relationship with a language they have already begun to learn.
The practical case is easy to make. There is no substitute for speaking. You can read for years, listen for years, write in the language for years, and still find — when the moment comes to actually open your mouth and produce the language in real time, in response to another person who is producing the language back at you — that the work you have done has not quite prepared you for the specific demand of speaking. Speaking is its own skill. It is built differently from reading and listening. It depends on the rapid retrieval of vocabulary you may have known passively for years but never had to retrieve under time pressure. It depends on the integration of grammar that you may have understood theoretically but never had to apply in the unforgiving real time of conversation. It depends, more than anything, on the simple repetition of the act of speaking — the accumulation of hours in which you have done the actual thing the practice is meant to develop.
This is well known. It is also, in practice, hard to arrange. Most of us do not live among native speakers of the languages we are trying to learn. We do not have the casual access to conversation that immersion would provide. We can travel periodically to countries where the language is spoken, and that travel is genuinely useful, but it is also expensive, infrequent, and often timed at moments when we are not at our best for sustained linguistic effort. What was missing, until quite recently in the history of language learning, was a way for the learner at home to access regular conversation with native speakers without the geographical and financial constraints that previously made such access difficult.
The online tutoring platforms changed this. They have allowed learners to find native speakers willing to teach for reasonable hourly rates, to schedule lessons at times that work for both parties across whatever time zones they happen to occupy, and to develop the kind of long-term relationships with individual teachers that produce, over years, the depth of practice that occasional encounters with strangers cannot.
I have been one of the beneficiaries of this development. The languages I have spent the most time speaking — Spanish first, French second, with smaller and engagements with Arabic and Italian — have been languages I have spoken largely through these platforms. The hours I have logged across years of online lessons would, if added together, amount to a substantial fraction of all the speaking I have ever done in any of these languages. Without the platforms, I would have spoken much less. I would, in turn, speak much worse.
What the lessons have taught me is not only the languages themselves. They have also taught me something about the kind of relationship that produces real progress, and the kind that does not.
The first lesson, which took me longer to learn than I would like to admit, is that consistency matters far more than intensity. A weekly hour-long lesson, sustained for a year, will produce more progress than a series of sporadic three-hour sessions across the same year, even though the total hours are similar. The reason is not mysterious. Language is a skill that is built through regular use, and the gap between sessions matters as much as the sessions themselves. A lesson once a week keeps the language present in your life across the seven days between lessons; a lesson once a month allows the language to recede, so that each session is partly spent recovering ground that was lost in the gap. I learned this slowly, by trying various arrangements over the years, and I now schedule my lessons with the frequency I have found to work — generally weekly, occasionally twice weekly when I am preparing for a trip or trying to push through a particular difficulty.
The second lesson is that the relationship with the individual teacher matters at least as much as the platform on which you find them. I have worked with teachers I clicked with quickly and teachers I clicked with slowly and teachers I never quite clicked with at all. The ones I have stayed with longest are the ones who have, in some way, become genuine acquaintances over the years — people I know things about, whose work I have followed, whose opinions on the news of their countries I have come to value, whose absences from our regular schedule I notice with concern. These relationships are partly transactional, of course. They are paid arrangements between adults. But the best of them have a quality that goes beyond the transaction, and the going beyond is part of what makes the practice work.
The third lesson is that the lessons themselves are not where the most learning happens. The lessons are where the learning is applied — where the words you have studied during the week are deployed, where the grammar you have read about is tested, where the pronunciation you have practiced in private gets exposed to a real listener. The actual learning happens in the spaces between lessons, when you are reading and listening and studying with the awareness that on Tuesday you will be expected to use what you have been preparing. The lesson is not the work. The lesson is what makes the work make sense.
I have used several platforms over the years. The earliest were rudimentary — barely more than message boards with payment processing — and I will not name them here because they have largely disappeared and because the current platforms are so much better that comparison would not be useful. What I want to say something about is the platform I have come to use most consistently and the one I now recommend without hesitation to learners who ask: italki.
What makes italki good is not any single feature. It is, more importantly, a combination of properties that have allowed it to become the platform of choice for a substantial portion of serious online language learners. There are large numbers of teachers across many languages, which means you can almost always find someone good in whatever language you are studying. The teachers are reviewable, so you can read what other learners have said about a teacher before committing to a trial lesson. The trial lesson option itself is valuable — it lets you try a teacher at a reduced rate before deciding whether to continue. The platform handles the logistics of scheduling, payment, and lesson notes, so that what you and the teacher have to focus on is the lesson itself rather than the administration around it. The interface is reasonably clean. The mobile and desktop versions both work. Customer service is responsive when issues arise. And the platform has been around long enough now, and is widely enough used, that the teachers on it tend to be people who have been doing this for a while, who know how to teach, and who have built up the kind of reputation that incentivizes them to continue doing it well.
I have used other platforms intermittently, and I have not stayed with any of them as long as I have stayed with italki. Other learners may have different experiences, and the platform that suits one learner best may not be the one that suits another best. But for me, after many years of trying various options, italki is where I have settled, and where I expect to remain.
What I would say to a learner considering this kind of practice for the first time is something like this:
Start with a single language. Find one teacher you can imagine working with for a year. Schedule a weekly lesson at a time you can actually keep. Show up to that lesson, week after week, for enough months that the relationship has time to develop and your speaking has time to improve. Notice, after six months, that your relationship with the language has changed in ways you would not have predicted. Notice, after a year, that you are someone who can actually speak the language — not perfectly, not without errors, but adequately, in the way that people who have done this kind of work for a year can speak.
Then, if you want, add a second language. Then, if you have the time and the appetite, a third. I would not recommend more than three at any one time, in the active maintenance mode I have been describing. Beyond three, the schedule becomes hard to keep, and the lessons begin to compete with each other for the attention each of them needs in order to be useful.
But three languages, sustained at one weekly lesson each, is — in my experience — a manageable practice for a working adult who is serious about maintaining a relationship with multiple languages across a lifetime. It is what I do now, and what I have done with various adjustments for years. The practice is not glamorous. It does not produce dramatic results in short timeframes. But it produces, slowly and consistently, the kind of real ability to speak that the cumulative hours of conversation, applied across years, eventually generate.
I want to close with something that has come to matter to me about this practice that I did not anticipate when I began it.
The teachers I have worked with over the years have become, in some small but real way, people I know. I have learned things about their countries from them — about Mexican and Colombian and Argentine politics from my Spanish tutors, about the small towns and the literary cultures and the daily textures of the places they live, about the books they read and the films they recommend and the music they listen to. I have learned things about the world that I would not have learned without them. I have practiced the language by talking about subjects that mattered to both of us, with people whose perspectives differed from mine in productive ways, and the difference has been part of the education.
This is not the only way to learn a language. It is not the most efficient way to learn a language. There are people who would dispute that it is even one of the better ways. But it has been, for me, one of the most rewarding ways — and the reward has not only been the language but also the human contact across borders that the practice produces. The languages have given me access to the world. The teachers have given me a small group of people in particular places who have become, over the years, presences in my life. I am grateful to all of them. I expect to continue working with them, and adding others, for as long as I am able to maintain this practice.
If you are a learner who has not yet tried this — who has been studying a language alone, through books and apps and self-directed effort — I would say only this: try a single lesson. Find a teacher on italki whose profile interests you, schedule a trial, and see what an hour of real conversation in the language you have been studying actually feels like. You may discover, as I did some years ago, that this is the practice your relationship with the language has been waiting for.
The reading and listening practice I have written about elsewhere is the foundation on which the conversation practice rests. Without the slow accumulation of vocabulary and structure that comes from sustained reading and listening, the conversation lessons would be conducted on too thin a base. With it, the conversations have ground to walk on. Together, the two practices have done most of what I can identify as the actual work of building real ability in the languages I am learning. Everything else has been support staff.
— A.C. Maas