Guide
App, group class or private tutor: what works for what
I teach privately, so treat what follows accordingly — and read it anyway, because the honest answer is that the three formats do different jobs, and that most people should use two of them at once.
In short
- An app is excellent for vocabulary and daily habit, and structurally unable to correct what you say.
- A group class gives rhythm, other learners and a lower price. It gives you about five minutes of speaking per hour.
- A private lesson is the only format where every minute is about your own mistakes. That is what you are paying for.
- The efficient combination is an app every day plus a private lesson once or twice a week. They fix different things.
What an app is genuinely good at
Vocabulary, spaced repetition, and the daily habit. These are real, and no teacher does them better: an app remembers exactly which word you got wrong three weeks ago and shows it to you again at the right moment. If you are not doing something like that, start — it costs ten minutes a day.
What it cannot do is judge a sentence you invented. It can check that you picked the right box; it cannot tell you that your sentence is grammatically perfect and that no French person would ever say it. That distinction is most of what a teacher is for.
When a group class is the better buy
More often than a private tutor will admit. A group is cheaper, it imposes a rhythm you will not impose on yourself, and hearing other people make the mistakes you are about to make is genuinely instructive. For a complete beginner with time and no deadline, it is a perfectly good choice.
The arithmetic is the limit. In a class of ten, an hour gives you about five minutes of speaking, and the pace is set by the middle of the group — too fast for some, too slow for others. If you need a specific level by a specific date, that arithmetic stops working.
What a private lesson actually buys
Not more knowledge — knowledge is free and everywhere. What you buy is attention: sixty minutes in which every correction is about a sentence you produced, every example uses your situation, and the pace is yours. In practice that means twenty to thirty minutes of speaking instead of five, and correction on the mistakes you actually make rather than the ones in the textbook.
It is also the only format that can be aimed at a date. A visa file in four months, an interview in six weeks, a move in a year: those turn into a plan, which is something neither an app nor a group can do.
A reasonable way to choose
- No deadline, small budget, starting from zero — an app every day, and a group class if one exists near you. Add a private lesson when you notice you understand far more than you can say.
- A date to hit — private, from the start. Nothing else can be aimed.
- Stuck at the same level for a year — private, because that plateau is almost always a speaking problem, and speaking is the one thing the other two formats cannot give you.
- An exam — private, at least for the written and spoken parts, which cannot be corrected alone.
Where I stand, said plainly
I sell private lessons, so I have an interest in the last column. That is exactly why the first two are described honestly: if an app and a group class are enough for what you need, taking your money would be a waste of it — and the free first conversation exists partly to say so when it is the case.
The question is not which is best
It is what you are missing right now. If you lack vocabulary, an app fixes it cheaply. If you lack rhythm, a group fixes it. If you understand and cannot speak, or you have a date to hit, nothing but a person on the other side will do — and twenty free minutes are enough to work out which of the three you actually need.
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