A reader once wrote to me after taking a one-hour private English lesson every week for almost a year. The lessons were expensive but had made little difference. They worked through practice questions and reviewed every answer with the tutor, yet still could not finish practice tests on time. Even after graduating from college and taking the test three or four times, their score remained stuck at around 600.
They had also bought several online courses but never finished them. Should they stop paying for expensive one-on-one lessons and switch to a course with weekly homework, forcing themselves to keep engaging with English outside class?
The Underlying Reason You Are Not Improving
First, we need to distinguish between two things: knowledge you understand conceptually and an intuitive feel for the language.
Consider a typical example of what a tutor might teach:
The meeting has been postponed.
The important points in this sentence might include:
- the present perfect
- the passive voice
- the word
postpone
A teacher might spend five minutes explaining these points. As long as your comprehension is not the problem, you will probably understand the present perfect, the passive voice, and the meaning of postpone by the end of it.
That sounds promising, but it does not mean you have mastered the grammar. You may still be unable to process the structure automatically when you hear it or use it naturally when you speak.
What you have learned is grammar as a concept, not an intuitive command of it.
Many native speakers do not know what the present perfect is or how to explain the rules of the passive voice, yet they use both fluently every day.
The same is true in our first language. Few English speakers can state the rule separating big, large, and great, or say why you make a decision but do a favor. We simply know which one to use and when.
This kind of studying can make you feel as though you have learned something even when your actual language ability has not improved.
So how do you develop this intuitive feel for a language?
You do not need another explanation of the grammar. You need to encounter 100 sentences that use the present perfect and see postponed used in ten different contexts. Each time, you need to try to understand the meaning of the whole sentence.
Only through repeated exposure can your brain build a richer, more efficient model of the language.
Once your brain has accumulated enough examples, you naturally begin to understand how those words and grammatical forms work in different situations. That is how we acquired almost every word in our first language—not by memorizing definitions.
At this point, you can probably see why continually taking classes or looking for another tutor is rarely helpful.
The first time a teacher explains a grammatical structure or word, that explanation may help you understand how it works conceptually. But an explanation cannot help you internalize it until it becomes an automatic response.
So if you keep taking lessons, much of the time you are simply reasoning your way through the same structures again. You stay stuck at that layer and never acquire the intuition.
Teachers also tend to explain grammatical concepts in the learner's first language, which means much of the lesson is spent listening to that language rather than processing English. That does little to strengthen your brain's model of English.
After learning a grammatical concept, you need to begin immersing, encounter that structure extensively in authentic content, and use it to understand sentences. Only then will you truly internalize it.
I have seen this happen before. One viewer originally scored a little over 600 on the TOEIC. He immersed for more than 600 hours over the course of a year, then took the test again without any special preparation and scored over 800.
Why? He had not hired a tutor or paid for classes.
During those 600-plus hours, he repeatedly processed authentic English and worked to understand the sentences he encountered. His vocabulary, grammatical intuition, and speed of comprehension all improved dramatically.
That is why his score rose so much even without targeted test preparation or drilling practice questions.
I once ran a similar experiment myself: I began immersing in Korean without studying any grammar, memorizing vocabulary, or taking classes. After roughly 200–300 hours of immersion, I gradually developed the ability to understand sentences.
That experiment also showed that studying grammar and memorizing vocabulary are not essential. Immersion is the one indispensable element in language learning. This is the central idea behind the input hypothesis.
When Is a Tutor Useful?
Does that mean classes and tutors are completely useless?
Not at all. Used strategically, feedback from a tutor or native speaker can help you progress faster.
Specifically, you can ask them to identify mistakes you cannot spot yourself or explain something you cannot understand on your own.
But one explanation is usually enough. Once you understand something conceptually, hearing the same lesson repeatedly will not produce any further meaningful progress.
You need to reinforce what you learned by encountering and understanding it repeatedly through long-term immersion and independent practice. That is how it becomes automatic.
For example, I once taught a student pronunciation.
In every lesson, I pointed out his pronunciation mistakes and showed him how to produce the correct sounds. With a word like phone, for example, we kept practicing until he could pronounce it correctly.
When he returned the following week, he had forgotten the correct pronunciation and gone back to his old mistake.
Why?
Because all he had done was attend the lesson. During the week, he had not immersed on his own, listened carefully to how native speakers produced the sound, or practiced it himself. Unsurprisingly, he returned to his old habit within a week.
The right approach is to ask a teacher to identify what is holding you back, then practice and improve independently.
Once you have genuinely mastered what you learned, return for another lesson and ask the teacher to introduce a new concept or identify other mistakes. Then go back and practice on your own again.
Continually attending lessons is therefore a waste of money. Your language ability will not improve simply because you keep sitting in a classroom.
In an effective lesson, you usually need to learn a concept only once. A teacher should give you a specific direction for practice and improvement. You then need extensive immersion and independent practice to truly master it.
If you do not know how to structure your practice, are unsure which direction to take, or want to improve your pronunciation, I also offer one-on-one programs.
My programs are designed around this same idea: I first identify the problem, then give you a specific direction for practice so you can train independently and internalize what you learn, instead of repeatedly taking lessons that do not help.
I strongly dislike classes that repeat the same material without providing real value. I would never want my own lessons to waste a student's time and money in the same way.
Language Learning Is Actually Inexpensive
Finally, I want to make one point clear: learning a language does not have to be expensive.
I spent almost nothing while learning languages myself. I simply kept watching YouTube videos and immersed extensively.
When many people want to improve their language ability, their first thought is to enroll in a cram school or hire a tutor, spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
But the analysis above should make the problem clear. This often amounts to paying for the reassurance that you are studying while your actual ability barely changes.
What works can be far more affordable. Let us look at the numbers.
A year of zeroStudy costs US$60. That works out to about $5 a month—the price of one coffee.
For that amount, the tool turns the content you already enjoy on YouTube and Netflix into language-learning material. You keep watching what interests you while steadily improving.
In one year, depending on how much time you put in, you can accumulate 500 or even 1,000 hours of effective immersion and learn thousands of words.
But $60 would buy roughly one hour with a tutor.
An hour of lessons will have almost no effect on your overall ability. Five hundred hours of immersion is a different matter entirely.
The viewer I mentioned earlier accumulated 600 hours of immersion in one year. Without any special preparation, his TOEIC score rose to over 800.
And remember, he did not study specifically for the test. That improvement came from a genuine increase in his overall English ability, not from drilling questions. With focused preparation, he might even have broken 900.
I hope this makes one thing clear: learning a language does not need to cost a fortune. Stop pouring money into lessons that leave you with little to show for it.