Unlocking Fluency with YourTeacher.ai: The key to escaping the intermediate stage? An Honest Review

Introduction

This is not sponsored and no one asked me to make this, just wanted to share with y’all my opinion!

So maybe you’re a language loving girly (or dude!) like me and you have that dream of one day being able to talk in that beautiful language of your dreams instead of boring and dull English. You decided to chase your dreams and study it (for real this time!), every single day. You’ve been going at it for a while now, and you’re quite proud of how far you’ve come from just the comfort of your bedroom. You can read and understand most content in the native language, your listening is gradually improving, but there’s just one issue–you still can’t actually SPEAK the language you’ve been studying for long! I have given this stage of language learning the title of intermediate hell. How exactly does this happen even after many months or years of excruciating effort?

Well, the main issue for this is quite obvious. If you’ve been learning from home like me then you likely can’t speak out loud because you never had an opportunity to speak to a native in your target language. It can definitely be daunting to speak to a native knowing how slow and choppy your speech currently is, but then how else could you ever hope to get to the elusive fluent speaking level otherwise? Another option might be to try those tutor apps like Italki, which I did enjoy for a while, but eventually the costs add up and there’s the ever present issue of lining up schedules. This is where the hope of YourTeacher.ai comes into play. Is this site the solution to our issues? Let’s find out!

A Short Background

Just so you can compare your experience with mine, I wanted to provide you with a quick background on my language learning journey and how I even came across this language learning tool.

Basically, in the summer of 2021, I landed an internship at a huge, diverse company. To my surprise, I would find myself in the minority as I was the only person on my team who couldn’t speak Spanish! That was the day I stopped letting my high school Spanish class trauma haunt me and learn Spanish non-traditionally i.e no more textbooks!

Instead, I started off with The Legendary DuoLingo app (this is sarcasm–can be explained in more detail in a post in the future. Connect with me through my YouTube or Pinterest!), combined with some Peppa Pig dubs, and Olly Richards’ Short Stories for Spanish Learners book (review coming soon!). 3 years ago when I started my Spanish journey with Richards’ book, it led me to his YouTube channel and I had been a fan of his ever since.

If you don’t already know, YourTeacher.ai was actually co-founded by Olly Richards and Xiaoma, another huge language learning YouTuber. I actually credit Richards with my current level of fluency in Spanish because he is the one who introduced the idea that story-learning is a very effective way for someone to learn a language. I managed to read all 4 of the novels from the Hunger Games series just based of this idea (which took almost 3 years to do, but totally worth it). Since reading exploded my vocabulary, it made it easier to practice listening, but now I’ve spent almost 3 years and have had barely any speaking hours under my belt.

This is why I was absolutely ecstatic to see that Olly Richards & Xiaoma had been collaborating to bring us a potentially revolutionary language speaking practice tool! I wasn’t able to find anyone to practice my Spanish with consistently during my language learning journey, so I thought this was the exact tool I was searching for. I waited about 2 weeks to decide for certain if I should dive in and when I was sure, I bought into the current $197 annual price point.

First Impressions & The Experience

As you continue to read my review, remember as of January 2024, YourTeacher.ai is still in early development. From what I’ve seen, their team is working really hard everyday and has already improved quite a lot since Xiaoma’s original video.

First of all, the app* user interface is quite clean and modern. It’s very easy on the eyes, though as a night owl I would have appreciated a dark mode feature. I also have been learning Chinese (rather inconsistently) for just shy of a year now, and was excited to try out both languages with the program. The fact that they already have a huge number of languages for someone who wants to become a polyglot was definitely appealing.

I immediately joined the Discord when I had paid for it because I thought this would be a good chance to meet real humans in the same intermediate hell phase as me. Unfortunately, it’s really more of place meant to give feedback to the developers. I’m constantly seeking new relationships so this felt like a real bummer to me, but if you weren’t interested in meeting others (which is the whole reason we’re using AI to practice with in the first place lol), then you can totally disregard this critique. On the bright side, Xiaoma is actually in the Discord server, which is pretty cool. And it’s great being able to ask others for tips & tricks on the platform.

Besides that, one of the features that had originally caught my attention was the relationship that you could potentially form with the artificial teacher. To my complete disappointment, when I was using the app, it’s like she would forget who I am constantly. I would introduce a topic I was interested in and the teacher would try to ask me a question, but after a correction, she would often return back to the basic “Cómo estás?”. Not only is this annoying, but it makes it difficult to actually build that relationship I was hoping for. Plus, the intermediate learner that this language speaking tool is advertised for is ready to go beyond those generic, basic phrases. One thing I have to mention though, is the accents for Spanish & Chinese are crazy amazing though! They did a fantastic job with that. I also loved that there was not just Spain Spanish, but also Mexican Spanish. (I believe there were more than just those two! Pretty cool.)

Another thing I really enjoyed were all the settings for the teachers in the app. You can change your teacher to your exactly learning preferences. How often do you want your tutor to correct you? Should the tutor speak casually to you or be more formal? How much English should the tutor use? How fast do you want them to speak? And the list goes on and on. It’s very impressive. Unfortunately, some of these settings didn’t seem to always work. For example, I had my tutor set to “correct all mistakes” and frequently the AI wouldn’t recognize the purposeful mistakes I made unless I asked if I made any error.

I really wish there would be a chat history or something of the sort because if you walk away and don’t remember what was said then it’s hard to keep going. I also wish there would be a more clear personality differences in the different tutors, but they’re more or less the same. I didn’t care for the passive/active flashcards feature that they hyped up quite a bit. Once you’re at this intermediate hell stage, flashcards and things of that sort aren’t particularly useful anymore. There were also moments when the AI tutor thought I was speaking English when I wasn’t. And this is a bit of nitpick, but they should add a cancel button for when you know you’ve made a mistake while speaking, but don’t want it to mess up the conversation.

I was under the impression that teacher could explain certain concepts or vocabulary, but when I would ask, the AI would seem to have a meltdown, and be unable to explain herself to me.

*Technically, there is no “app”. I just used the phone browser. Had there not been a nice-looking phone browser I would not have bothered with purchasing the app because I intended to use this language learning tool more like a daily phone call with a friend. Fret not, the phone browser looks great and works well on Safari.

Final Thoughts & Helpful (and Free!) Alternatives

I ultimately spent a grand total of 3 days on the app. Actually, after night one of using it, I made sure to message them reminding me what their current refund policy is (it’s currently 7 days btw) because I could tell I wasn’t likely to stick with it for a long time. Although initially impressed with the wide options of languages you can use with this tool, I really think they should focus on the most widely spoken languages first and really clean them up before adding others. They may be trying to do too much too soon.

The verdict: The YourTeacher.ai app addresses a huge blind spot in the language learning market and has a real chance to be extremely successful, but for right now, it’s simply too early. I have a lot of hope and vision for where this project could go, but it’s just not there yet and I would save that $200 for something more useful in today’s crazy economy. I encourage you to check it out yourself, as there are plenty of people in the Discord who had a wonderful time using this tool, but I just don’t see a use for it right now.

The real solution to the intermediate speaking gap? Try these free alternatives! An AI solution I’m sure you’ve already heard plenty about works great for right now. Using the microphone function on ChatGPT in the mobile app works well for Spanish (sadly, it doesn’t seem to recognize Chinese right now). I’m pretty impressed with the natural Spanish accent it has. It has both a manual mode and an automatic back and forth conversation mode which I really love for that phone call conversation feel I’m trying to imitate. It also does better with remembering what we were talking about, and has chat history. It’s not perfect, but it works better than YourTeacher.ai for now, and don’t forget it’s free!

Another way to get more comfortable at speaking in a foreign language is to try recording yourself speaking the language. Talk about any subject you want for the day, and then listen back to the audio to see where you can improve or mistakes you might have made. There’s obvious flaws here in this method as well, but I won’t complain too much for anything that costs me zero dollars and zero cents.

Overall, there’s definitely not a 100% great solution out for the intermediate hell stage of language learning, so I will for sure come back to YourTeacher.ai in the future, as I see the vision and would love to see the day when the dream is realized. However, for now, I really need that extra $200.

Are you going to try it out? It’s definitely worth checking it out for that initial 7 day period. Got any extra questions about YourTeacher.ai? Feel free to contact me and I’ll let you know what I know!