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Category: Language Learning

Can AI Replace a Human Language Tutor? My Experience After Years on Preply

I have been learning Mandarin on and off for years, and in 2022 I finally decided that self-study alone was not enough. That was when I started using Preply. Until then, I could study vocabulary, learn grammar, listen to recordings, work through textbooks and use online resources. What I could not easily do by myself was have an actual conversation, so I started taking lessons with a native Mandarin speaker.

A few years ago, I would probably have said quite confidently that this was one thing technology could not replace. Now I am not so sure. AI has changed very quickly, and I can ask it to explain the difference between two Chinese words, tell me whether a sentence I have written sounds natural, create exercises around vocabulary I am learning, or give me examples at approximately my level. I can even speak Mandarin to it and have it answer me.

At that point, the obvious question is: if AI can already do all of this, do I still need to pay for a human tutor? After several years of using Preply, stopping for a while, and then returning to it, I think the answer is more complicated than simply yes or no.

Learning Mandarin with both a human tutor and AI language practice.

For Some Things, AI Can Probably Replace a Tutor

There are parts of language learning for which I no longer think I need to pay someone by the hour. Grammar is an obvious example. If I do not understand why 又 belongs in one sentence and 再 belongs in another, I can ask AI. If the explanation does not make sense, I can ask it to explain it differently, then ask for ten examples, a quiz, or five sentences where I have to choose the correct word. There is no clock ticking while I do this.

The same applies to vocabulary. I can compare similar words, ask for example sentences, practise sentence construction or ask why something I wrote sounds unnatural. Unlike a weekly lesson, AI is available whenever I happen to want it. Sometimes a question occurs to me late at night, and I do not have to write it down and remember to ask my tutor several days later.

For this kind of study, AI is extremely useful. In fact, I would rather do much of this outside my paid lesson and use tutor time for something I cannot reproduce quite so easily.

AI Can Even Talk to Me

This is where things become more interesting. One of the main reasons I started using Preply was speaking practice, because understanding Mandarin and actually producing Mandarin are two very different things. You can recognise hundreds of words while reading or listening and then suddenly discover that your brain has misplaced every single one of them when somebody asks you a question.

AI can now help with this too. I can tell it to speak to me in Mandarin at roughly HSK 3 or HSK 4 level, ask it to correct what I say, slow down, repeat itself or explain something I did not understand. In some ways, this is easier than speaking to a person. If I say something ridiculous, I do not have to be embarrassed. 😂 I can stop halfway through, try the same sentence several times, switch to English, or abandon the conversation entirely and come back later.

And that last point is also part of the problem.

I Stopped Preply — and Eventually Came Back

I stopped taking regular Preply lessons in 2024. It was not because I had decided that tutoring was no longer useful; ACCA and work were taking up more of my time, and Mandarin simply moved further down the priority list. For quite a while, my learning became much less consistent.

By the time I returned to Preply in mid-2026, AI language tools were considerably better than they had been when I first started taking lessons. Technically, I had more ways to study independently than ever before. But I realised that what I had been missing was not access to explanations, exercises or vocabulary lists. I missed having an actual lesson coming up.

That sounds like a small thing, but for someone like me who is not naturally the most disciplined self-learner, it matters.

A Human Tutor Gives Me Another Layer of Accountability

If an AI conversation is available whenever I want it, it is also very easy to decide that I will do it tomorrow, and tomorrow can become next week. A booked lesson is different. There is another person who will be there at a particular time, and I know I am going to have to talk. That gives me a reason to prepare.

I am more likely to review vocabulary because I might actually need to retrieve it during the lesson. I am more likely to think about what I want to say, and I pay more attention to things I have recently learned because I know there is a possibility that they will come up in conversation. The lesson itself also creates a kind of pressure that AI does not — not unpleasant pressure, just enough.

If I cannot remember how to say something to AI, I can close the conversation. If I cannot remember how to say something to my tutor, there is another person waiting for me to finish the thought, so I have to try. I might hesitate, use the wrong word or have to explain the idea in a simpler way, but that is much closer to what happens in a real conversation.

AI can remind me to study and it can even simulate accountability, but knowing that I will have to communicate with a real person affects my behaviour differently. For me, that is one of the biggest reasons a human tutor still has value.

Real Conversation Is Messy

There is another difference: AI conversations tend to be very accommodating, while real people are not always so predictable. They misunderstand you, use words you were not expecting, change the subject, speak faster than you would like, tell stories and interrupt. Sometimes the conversation wanders somewhere completely different from the lesson material, and that is useful.

Language does not normally happen in carefully controlled exercises. It happens between people who have their own personalities, habits, experiences and ways of expressing themselves. That unpredictability forces me to listen differently and to respond rather than simply complete an exercise.

A Tutor Gets to Know How You Speak

There is another advantage that becomes more noticeable when you stay with the same tutor: they start knowing you. Not just who you are, but how you use the language. A tutor who has heard me speak repeatedly can recognise the mistakes I tend to make, notice that we covered something before, and tell when I probably know a word but simply cannot retrieve it quickly enough.

They also bring their own experiences into the conversation. A discussion about weather can suddenly become a conversation about daily life. A vocabulary word can lead to a cultural explanation. Something I say can remind my tutor of something completely unrelated, and suddenly we are discussing a topic I never prepared for. Those are often the moments when speaking practice becomes most useful.

AI can provide information about Chinese culture, but information about a culture and having a conversation with someone who actually lives within it are not quite the same thing.

So Can AI Replace a Human Tutor?

For some learners, perhaps it can. If someone is extremely disciplined, comfortable speaking to AI and mainly wants structured practice, the amount that can now be done without a human tutor is remarkable. For me, however, I do not think I would replace a human tutor completely. I would use one differently.

I no longer think I need to spend much of a paid lesson listening to basic grammar explanations. AI, textbooks, courses and other resources can handle a lot of that. I would rather study those things independently and use my tutor for the parts that are harder to reproduce alone: speaking, pronunciation, real-time vocabulary retrieval, unpredictable conversation, and the accountability of knowing that another person will actually be waiting for me.

AI has therefore not made human tutoring useless for me. If anything, it has made me more selective about what I want from a tutor. AI can be the infinitely patient study partner that is available whenever I need it, while a human tutor gives me something else: another human being I actually have to communicate with.

And for someone who is learning a language because she ultimately wants to speak to real people, I still think that matters.

August 30, 2026
My First Mandarin Words Weren’t 你好

It was the 1980s, and I remember afternoons in Johor Bahru when television was still something you had to wait for. Channels weren’t broadcasting twenty-four hours a day. They started at particular times, sometimes in the morning, sometimes around noon or later. At that age, I couldn’t properly tell the time yet, but I could read numbers and I knew what the clock was supposed to look like. When the short hand pointed towards 3 and the long hand pointed towards 12, I knew it was time to turn on the television.

My mother had this huge Singer colour TV. At least, it seemed huge to me then. We could receive Singapore television from Johor Bahru, and I watched quite a lot of it. If I remember correctly, Channel 5 was mainly the English-language channel while Channel 8 had much more Chinese programming.

I actually learnt a surprising amount from television. I learnt to read partly from watching Sesame Street. But at the same time, without anyone deliberately teaching me, I was also absorbing bits and pieces of Mandarin from Singaporean Chinese dramas.

And apparently national anthems. I learnt to sing Majulah Singapura before I learnt Negaraku. 😂

For anyone unfamiliar with this little Malaysia-Singapore oddity, Majulah Singapura, meaning “Onward Singapore”, is Singapore’s national anthem. Negaraku, meaning “My Country”, is Malaysia’s national anthem. I was Malaysian and living in Johor Bahru, yet somehow I learnt Singapore’s anthem first.

The Singapore television channels would play it when broadcasting began and ended, and after hearing it over and over again, I simply learnt it. I can still sing Majulah Singapura today.

Apparently repetition works. It also worked on my Mandarin.

My first Mandarin words were not 你好

When people start learning Mandarin now, one of the first things they usually learn is:

你好
nǐ hǎo
Hello.

That was definitely not how Mandarin entered my vocabulary. My first Mandarin words were considerably more dramatic.

The Singapore channels showed a lot of Chinese dramas. I remember period dramas, kung fu, people fighting with swords and, naturally, people somehow flying from tree to tree. And because television dramas apparently involved a great deal of kidnapping, fighting and general emotional distress, some of the sounds that stuck in my head were things like:

救命啊！
jiùmìng a!
Help!

放开我！
fàngkāi wǒ!
Let go of me!

And another sound I remembered for years, which I only understood properly much later:

求求你呀！
qiúqiu nǐ ya!
Please! / I’m begging you!

Very practical vocabulary for a small child. 😂

At the time, of course, I didn’t know the characters, the pinyin or even exactly what I was hearing. I just remembered the sounds. Years later, after I began studying Mandarin properly, some of those old fragments suddenly became recognisable.

“Oh. THAT is what they were saying.”

There is something very strange about discovering that words you are supposedly “learning” have actually been sitting somewhere in your memory for decades.

The Samsui Women

One drama that stayed particularly strongly in my memory was Samsui Women — 红头巾, literally “The Red Bandana” (Wikipedia). I remembered it as an incredibly long and rather sad drama.

Looking it up now, I discovered that it was only 24 episodes. Twenty-four! In my childhood memory, these women appeared to spend half their lives on television. 😂

The drama followed Samsui women who came from Sanshui in China to Singapore looking for work, particularly in the construction industry. They became known for their distinctive red headscarves and for the physically demanding work they did during Singapore’s development.

What I remembered, though, was not historical information. I remembered women getting older. I remembered hardship. I remembered that it felt sad.

I remember following some of these women from when they were young until they were much older, and I vaguely remember deaths as well, although after all this time I certainly wouldn’t trust myself to reconstruct the plot episode by episode.

I was fascinated to learn much later that these were stories connected to real women who had helped build Singapore. The production itself apparently tried to speak with actual Samsui women while researching the drama, although many had already moved away from the places where they had once lived and some were reluctant to talk about their past.

None of this was something I understood while watching it. I didn’t need to. I understood enough to know that what was happening mattered.

Perhaps that is another reason Mandarin stayed with me. Long before I understood the language, I had already learnt that emotion could come through it.

Mandarin grew on me before I learnt it

When I look back now, I don’t think there was one moment when I suddenly decided that I liked Mandarin. It grew on me. Or perhaps it grew in me.

First there were sounds coming from a television in Johor Bahru. Then there were strange words I remembered without knowing why. There were Chinese period dramas and kung fu and people flying through trees. There was Samsui Women. There were years in between. And eventually there was me, as an adult, actually sitting down and learning Mandarin.

Maybe that also explains something about the way I learn languages now. I live in Hungary, but I hardly watch Hungarian television. To be completely honest, I don’t even really know how Hungarian television works these days because I simply don’t watch it. Perhaps that partly explains why Hungarian does not seem to sink into my brain as easily.

Mandarin, meanwhile, is everywhere because I keep putting it everywhere. I take Mandarin lessons. I watch Chinese dramas. I watch Chinese videos. I read things in Chinese. I look things up. I listen to people speaking it.

The amount of Mandarin I deliberately consume is sometimes slightly ridiculous. If you looked only at my media habits, you might think I was somewhat delusional and had convinced myself that I lived in China rather than Hungary. 😅

But perhaps I am simply recreating something that happened naturally when I was a child. Back then, Mandarin came through the television whether I understood it or not. Now I am the one turning it on.

And after all these years, my first Mandarin words still weren’t 你好. They were basically:

HELP! LET GO OF ME! I’M BEGGING YOU!

Which, considering the Chinese dramas I grew up watching, feels entirely appropriate.

August 15, 2026
Talking About Drought, Yoghurt and Hot Springs in Mandarin

On 11 August, I had another Mandarin speaking lesson with Yufan on Preply. Our main topic was 自然灾害 (zìrán zāihài) — natural disasters.

The topic was surprisingly relevant because Hungary has been very dry lately.

I told Yufan:

匈牙利干旱，很久没下雨了。
Hungary is experiencing drought, and it hasn’t rained for a long time.

We also talked about the Danube:

多瑙河的水位下降了。
The water level of the Danube has fallen.

There were already several new words for me here.

干旱 (gānhàn) — drought
水位 (shuǐwèi) — water level
下降 (xiàjiàng) — to fall, decrease
干涸 (gānhé) — to dry up

Then we moved on to the heat.

I told Yufan:

上个星期最高温度是41度。
Last week, the highest temperature was 41°C.

She was surprised. She hadn’t expected Hungary to get that hot.

This week, however:

这个星期降温了，现在最高温度是35度。
This week it has cooled down. Now the highest temperature is 35°C.

Another useful word:

降温 (jiàngwēn) — for the temperature to fall; to cool down

We talked about what people should do when the temperature suddenly drops:

突然降温应该做什么？
What should you do when the temperature suddenly drops?

That brought us to 预防感冒 (yùfáng gǎnmào) — preventing a cold — and things like 多喝热水drinking hot water , 多吃含有vitamin C的食物 eating food containing vitamin C and 穿适合的衣服 wearing suitable clothes.

I asked whether Chinese say 喝药 “drink medicine” or 吃药 “eat medicine” because in Japanese I know they say 薬を飲みます (kusuri o nomimasu), literally “drink medicine.” To which she said: 看情况 – it depends. It depends on the form. Somehow this led to learning the words:

液体 (yètǐ) — liquid
固体 (gùtǐ) — solid

And this was probably one of my favourite little discoveries from the lesson.

We started talking about yoghurt.

In Chinese, it is very common to say:

我喝酸奶。
I drink yoghurt.

Yufan explained that 喝酸奶 (hē suānnǎi) is commonly used even when the yoghurt is quite thick. 吃酸奶 (chī suānnǎi) is also used, especially when yoghurt is treated more obviously as something spoonable, but 喝酸奶 is a very normal expression.

I found that particularly interesting because we had just been talking about 液体 and 固体. Whether the yoghurt seems more liquid or more solid does not necessarily determine which verb Chinese speakers naturally use.

我觉得很有意思。 😄

We also practised:

室内 (shìnèi) — indoors
室外 (shìwài) — outside
户外 (hùwài) — outdoors

and the sentence:

不要长时间待在户外。
Don’t stay outdoors for a long time.

From there the conversation wandered even further.

We somehow ended up talking about 温泉酒店 (wēnquán jiǔdiàn) — hot spring hotels — including rose baths, green tea baths, milk baths and medicinal baths.

And eventually we went back to the topic of 自然灾害 natural disasters again.

Wrapping up with the question of whether my country had ever experienced 火山爆发 (huǒshān bàofā) — volcanic eruption.

So what began as a conversation about natural disasters somehow travelled from drought in Hungary, to the Danube, 41-degree weather, sudden temperature changes, yoghurt, staying indoors, hot springs and finally volcanoes.

That is actually what I like about these speaking lessons. I never quite know where the conversation is going to go, and along the way I pick up words that I probably would not have deliberately chosen to study from a vocabulary list.

(more…)

August 12, 2026