The internet changed language learning for the better. You can book a lesson with someone on the other side of the world, pay in two clicks and never leave your bedroom. It couldn’t be easier.
It’s still not quite enough, the same way a video call doesn’t replace meeting a friend for dinner.
What does a video call miss?
In person, you get gestures, faces and mouths. Pronunciation is easier when you can watch how someone shapes a sound, and a shrug or a pointed finger rescues a sentence that’s missing its noun.
You also get a room full of things to talk about. I once had a few students over to my flat for an informal evening. One of them went through my DVD shelf (if you’re reading this in 2026: remember those?) and picked up words just from recognizing the titles in another language. Another asked about the books on my bookshelf. Nobody had planned a lesson, and we talked for hours.
Why three people talk better than forty
A classroom makes sense when one teacher has to get 40 children through the same curriculum. Most of us aren’t in school anymore, though, and we don’t all want to learn the same way or talk about the same things. A course built for everyone ends up being about topics nobody really cares about.
One-to-one lessons are great for going deep into what you like. Small groups are good too, because you can steer the conversation and find people who share your interests. Above all, you get to talk, which hardly happens when you’re one of 40 or when someone else runs the whole conversation.
Watch a sitcom and count the people in each scene. It’s usually about three (or two and a half). My guess is that’s because conversation works well at that size: one person talks while the other two think. Big gatherings are fun, but look closely and the real conversations happen in little clusters of three or four.
“We jump”: the verbs a textbook drills
Textbooks teach verbs in a fixed pattern, from first person singular to third person plural, and then repeat it for every verb. “I jump, you jump, he jumps, we jump.” When do you ever say “we jump”? At a 90s party, maybe, when Kris Kross comes on. Otherwise almost never.
When you talk in real situations, the verbs you actually need come up again and again, and they stick without you noticing. You start building new verbs from the patterns you’ve heard in other ones, instead of reciting tables.
The same goes for grammar questions. Students often asked me when to use the past perfect. No native English speaker decides that consciously; it just comes out right, because they’ve heard it in context thousands of times. A classroom splits a language into separate blocks, often taught by different teachers, and the context that ties them together gets lost.
I’m not against drills. Some things need them: if you want to read Japanese, there’s no way around writing kanji over and over, and a few grammar exercises do help you get a feel for how a language works. I just think a lot of courses overdo it, and that most people would get further if they started talking much sooner.
Making mistakes among friends
Meeting outside a classroom keeps the useful part (you still focus, and you still speak the language you’re learning) and drops the textbook dialogues nobody would ever say. With people you like, the fear of saying something wrong fades fast.
That matters. Worrying about being perfect blocks people more than any grammar point. Everyone makes mistakes all the time, and you only stop making them by making plenty first. If you’re cramming for a certificate, this may feel too loose. If you want to speak naturally, it’s the shortest way there.
How did the best speaker you know learn?
Think of the best speaker of a foreign language you know, and ask them how they learned it. It’s rare to hear “mostly from textbooks.” Usually there were friends, a partner’s family or a place where they had to get by in that language. Few people have chatted their way to fluency with a grammar book and a highlighter.