What Is Preply And How Useful Is It For Travellers?

I have travelled to more than 150 countries over the last twenty-five years, picked up useful phrases in dozens of languages and become reasonably adept at making myself understood when I have absolutely no idea what anyone is saying. What I had never managed to do was actually learn another language well enough to speak it properly.

Years of phrasebooks, self-learning apps and memorised travel phrases had never taken me much beyond the basics. I could usually learn enough to order food, ask directions or manage a few polite exchanges, but I had never built the confidence or understanding needed to hold a real conversation, and this is something I wanted to change. What I needed was a different way of learning, one that went beyond memorising useful phrases and helped me understand how a language actually worked so I could start using it for myself.

That was where Preply came in. It is a personalised, human-led language-learning platform built around live one-to-one lessons with real tutors, with technology and supporting tools designed to reinforce that learning rather than replace the human interaction at its centre. Instead of relying entirely on self-directed exercises, the emphasis is on learning directly with another person who can adapt lessons to your level, goals and progress.

For someone who had spent years convinced that languages simply weren’t one of my strengths, it offered the chance to find out whether learning one-to-one with a real tutor could finally bridge the gap between knowing a few useful words and actually being able to communicate in another language.

What Is Preply? Quick Answer

Preply is a personalised, human-led language-learning platform that connects learners with expert tutors for live one-to-one lessons online. At its core is human-to-human learning, with lessons tailored to your existing ability, learning style and individual goals, whether that means becoming more confident in everyday conversation, preparing to travel or developing a much deeper understanding of a language. Digital tools support learning between lessons, but they are designed to enhance rather than replace the real conversations and human interaction at the centre of the experience.

For travellers who want to move beyond learning a handful of useful phrases, that one-to-one approach can be particularly valuable. Working directly with a tutor gives you the opportunity to practise speaking with another person, ask questions, understand why the language works the way it does and learn how to construct your own responses rather than simply repeat phrases you have memorised. It still takes time, regular practice and effort, but for learners who genuinely want to make real progress and develop practical language skills they can use with real people, Preply offers a much more personalised and conversation-focused way to learn.

Why Had I Never Managed To Learn A Language Before?

Honestly, as someone who has travelled the world extensively for most of my life, this has been a constant source of embarrassment for me, especially when I have met so many other travellers who seem to pick it up so easily. For years, every attempt I made to learn another language followed roughly the same pattern. I would pick up a phrasebook, download a self-learning app, memorise a collection of useful expressions before a trip and convince myself that this time I was finally making progress. I could usually learn enough to order food, ask for directions, greet people politely and manage a few basic exchanges, which was useful, but it never developed into anything deeper.

The problem was that most of what I was learning only worked when the conversation behaved exactly as I expected it to. I could remember how to ask for a table, buy a ticket or find the nearest station, but those carefully rehearsed phrases usually fell apart the moment someone replied with something I had not prepared for. A question delivered a little faster than expected, a different choice of words or an unexpected follow-up was often enough to leave me staring blankly before retreating into English.

After enough failed attempts, it became easy to assume that the problem was me. I just assumed my brain wasn’t wired that way. I had no difficulty learning complicated subjects elsewhere in my life, yet languages seemed to occupy some mysterious corner of my brain that simply refused to cooperate. I could remember vocabulary for a few days, but I struggled to turn individual words into anything useful, and every awkward attempt at conversation seemed to reinforce the idea that I simply wasn’t very good at learning languages.

Looking back, the real problem was not that I had failed to put in any effort. It was that I had spent years trying to memorise the visible surface of a language without really understanding what sat underneath it. I knew isolated phrases, but I did not understand how sentences were built, why words changed or how to adapt what I knew when a conversation moved away from the exact situation I had prepared for. I had collected a strange smorgasbord of phrases and vocabulary, but very little of it felt like something I could genuinely use.

Eventually, I decided that if I was ever going to break that cycle, I needed to stop trying to learn a little bit of everything and choose one language to learn properly. Spanish made the most sense. It is widely spoken all over the world, I travelled regularly in Spain and elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, and for me, it was one of the languages that seemed almost impossible to learn.

I genuinely wanted to be able to use it beyond the basics, and I had already spent years proving to myself that memorising more phrases or casually dipping in and out of a self-learning app was not going to get me there. What I needed was a new approach.

How Preply Actually Works

Preply is surprisingly easy to use from the start. It approaches language learning very differently from other self-learning apps, and the platform is built around live, one-to-one lessons with real tutors. Rather than being built primarily around lists of phrases to repeat and memorise, the learning experience is shaped around the individual. You sign up, choose the tutor who best fits your needs and use the built-in digital learning tools alongside your lessons as you need them. There are personalised grammar and vocabulary exercises, lesson feedback and real-world speaking practice available between sessions, but these are designed to reinforce the human-led learning rather than replace it. Your current ability, reasons for learning, preferred pace, availability and wider goals all influence how the whole experience develops.

Choosing The Right Tutor

Signing up was straightforward, and the personalisation starts almost immediately. There are thousands of tutors to choose from and almost any language you can imagine, so it can be a little daunting at first, but after a short set of sign-up questions about my current level, what I wanted to achieve, how quickly I hoped to reach that goal, the way I preferred to learn and the times I was realistically available for lessons, I was given a curated selection from thousands of tutors who matched those preferences.

That made the process a lot easier, and it felt far more personal than simply scrolling through an endless directory. I could compare profiles, teaching experience and styles, availability, price and individual approaches, with the results already closely matched to what I had said I needed. Some placed more emphasis on structured grammar, others were more conversational, while some focused on particular goals such as travel, exams, business or confidence in speaking.

That choice is really important. Learning one-to-one is inherently personal, and no two people respond to exactly the same teaching style. Some learners need structure and repetition, others learn far better through conversation and explanation, and some simply need a tutor whose personality makes them comfortable enough to keep trying when they get something wrong.

I wanted someone who could explain the foundations clearly but who would also challenge me and make me talk in that language, because that was the part I had always avoided. Being able to choose a tutor around those needs meant I wasn’t simply being dropped into a predetermined course and expected to keep up. The learning could begin where I actually was rather than where a generic syllabus assumed I should be.

Starting With A Trial Lesson

Of course, with so many tutors to choose from, it can be difficult to know whether you have made the right choice straight away. A profile can tell you a lot about someone’s experience and teaching style, but it cannot tell you whether the two of you will actually work well together. The good news is that you are never tied to one particular tutor, and the trial lesson gives you a chance to find out before committing to regular lessons.

The trial lesson gives both learner and tutor an opportunity to work out where the starting point really is and whether the relationship is likely to work. That includes discussing your existing ability, why you want to learn the language, the situations in which you hope to use it and what kind of progress you are trying to make.

That conversation is useful because language ability is rarely as simple as beginner, intermediate or advanced. Someone may recognise a surprising amount of vocabulary but struggle to construct a sentence, understand written language far better than spoken conversation or, like me, know bits and pieces of grammar while having almost no confidence using it aloud. A good tutor can start identifying those gaps very quickly and shape future lessons around them.

It also gives you a chance to judge the tutor themselves. Their knowledge obviously matters, but so do their personality, communication style and the way they explain things. If you are going to spend hours making mistakes in front of another person, asking questions and occasionally staring at them in complete confusion, feeling comfortable enough to do that is an important part of the process.

Personalised One-To-One Lessons

Once regular lessons begin, the biggest difference is that there is another human being responding to what you actually do rather than a programme waiting for a predetermined answer. A tutor can hear when pronunciation is slightly wrong, notice when you have misunderstood a rule, recognise when you are guessing rather than understanding and change the explanation when something simply isn’t making sense, which for me was quite a lot! My tutor honestly had the patience of a saint!

The lessons themselves take place in Preply’s online Classroom. This isn’t as daunting as it sounds; it isn’t like being back at school! All it means is you have a dedicated online space where the live video lesson, tutor interaction and supporting learning materials are kept together within the same platform. As well as the video lesson itself, you can return to lesson notes afterwards, revisit material you covered, receive homework from your tutor and access resources they have sent you between sessions. It means there is no need to jump between separate video calls, notes and learning tools every time you study; the whole learning environment sits around that one-to-one relationship.

That creates a much more dynamic form of learning. Obviously no two lessons will be the same, so I can only give my experience, but having someone to talk to directly, using as much Spanish as possible from the start as we got to know each other, really helped me get used to hearing and responding to the language in real time as we went through the formal lessons.

Switching between Spanish and English was minimised, so it felt completely immersive from the start. Obviously, at the beginning I had to use far more English, but after a month there was a definite difference in how often I had to do this. I could stop and ask why a sentence was constructed in a particular way, practise the same idea several times when it refused to stick, move more quickly through something I understood easily or spend an entire lesson working through a specific problem that would otherwise continue tripping me up. One of the big ones for me was switching between masculine and feminine forms. It felt like I had to learn two ways of saying and hearing things instead of one and, honestly, it got frustrating at times!

But this human-to-human learning made all the difference. That immersion in the language with a native speaker meant there was nowhere to hide behind a memorised answer or simply retreat into English whenever I became uncomfortable. I had to expose myself to Spanish, listen to it and, most importantly, actually use it with another person. My tutor would occasionally phrase a question differently than I expected, use a less formal version of a phrase common among locals or start to speak a little more quickly to force my brain to adapt. Honestly, Spanish at full speed is one of the hardest languages to decipher! That unpredictability is useful because real conversations work in exactly the same way. You have to listen, interpret what has been said, work out what you want to say in return and then attempt to express it, all in real time.

Sometimes it felt like I was throwing myself in at the deep end, but every time it got too much, my tutor would pull back slightly and guide me through. That’s the real difference with working with another person.

Learning Between Lessons

This is the part of Preply that feels more familiar if you have used traditional self-learning apps before, but with the added advantage of being tailored to what you are actually doing in your lessons.

The live lessons are the core of Preply, but the platform also includes AI-powered tools designed to support learning between them. Daily Exercises provide personalised grammar and vocabulary practice, while Lesson Insights give feedback on areas you have actually covered, including vocabulary, grammar and speaking. That means you can revisit the parts you struggled with and see where you are getting things right. Scenario Practice then gives you a way to practise real-world speaking situations independently.

The important distinction is that these tools are designed to supplement and enhance the human instruction rather than replace it. Many self-learning apps are built primarily around one core format of independent practice, whereas Preply combines those kinds of digital exercises with live one-to-one tuition. The tutor remains at the centre of the learning experience, while the digital tools give you additional ways to reinforce what you have covered, revisit weaker areas and keep practising between sessions.

For me, that combination worked far better than just relying on self-learning with digital tools. The one-to-one lessons provided the direction, explanation and real conversation I had been missing, while the independent exercises gave me somewhere to practise and reinforce those foundations between lessons.

Building A Regular Learning Routine

Preply is also structured around ongoing learning rather than isolated lessons whenever the mood takes you. Once you have found a tutor you want to continue with, lessons can be scheduled around your availability and adjusted as your routine changes, while the subscription model is designed to encourage regular contact rather than occasional bursts of activity.

That does require more commitment than opening a self-learning app for five minutes every now and then, but that was part of what I needed. If something is worth doing, particularly if the aim is to develop a genuine skill, then you have to devote some time to it.

My previous attempts at learning languages had always been easy to abandon because there was nobody waiting for me and very little consequence if I ignored them for another week. Having regular time set aside with another person made learning something I actually had to show up for, and over time that consistency became as important as anything that happened during the lessons themselves.

Obviously, in an ideal world, anyone learning a language would be able to immerse themselves in it every single day, but that simply isn’t realistic for most people. It certainly wasn’t for me. I had work, travel and everything else going on around it, so I couldn’t suddenly devote hours every day to learning Spanish. What I could do was commit to a few days each week with a formal lesson, and the exercises, homework or revision from previous lessons fitting around them.

That routine was never completely set in stone. Some weeks I had more time than others, lessons occasionally had to move and there were inevitably days when Spanish had to take a back seat to everything else. What mattered was having enough regularity that I was constantly returning to the language instead of abandoning it for weeks at a time and having to start again. Knowing I had another lesson coming up also gave me a reason to revisit what I had learned, complete the work my tutor had given me and arrive ready to build on it rather than repeatedly going over old ground.

That was probably the most realistic balance for me. Learning a language still required time and effort, but it didn’t have to take over my life or feel like going back to school. A few regular lessons, some independent practice between them and the knowledge that another human being would be there at the next session gave the whole process enough structure to keep me moving forward without making it feel like another job.

Finally Learning How The Language Actually Works

For years I had tried to learn languages from the outside in. I memorised useful phrases, repeated vocabulary and collected ready-made sentences for the situations I thought I was likely to encounter, but I never really understood what held any of it together. With my tutor, that approach was turned completely on its head. Instead of starting with the finished sentence, we went right back to the beginning and learned how the language itself was built.

That meant covering the things I had always skimmed past in favour of something that felt more immediately useful: pronouns, vowels, basic sentence structure, how verbs changed depending on who was speaking, how gender affected words, where different parts of a sentence belonged and why Spanish was constructed the way it was. None of that felt as satisfying as instantly learning how to order dinner or ask for directions, but for the first time I was building the foundations needed to create those sentences for myself rather than simply memorising someone else’s.

And it was hard. Really hard at times. In some ways it felt like I had to unlearn a lot of the fundamental rules I had taken for granted from an English perspective, because grammar, word order and even syntax can work very differently in Spanish. It was frustrating because things that felt instinctive in English suddenly had to be consciously picked apart and rebuilt in a completely different way.

Memorising a phrase gives you one answer to one situation, you can ask for a drink, or even if you want to be adventurous, ask for directions to the library, but understanding the structure underneath it gives you the tools to change the subject, alter the object, swap in new vocabulary, adapt the tense and build something completely new when the conversation moves away from what you expected. Instead of trying to remember hundreds of isolated sentences and phrases, I was beginning to understand the rules that allowed me to make my own.

Why Learning With A Real Person Made Such A Difference

Learning those foundations properly was important, but understanding them intellectually was only half the battle. I still had to actually use them, and that was where working regularly with another person started making a much bigger difference than I had expected.

I’m not going to lie, learning Spanish was frustrating at times. There were lessons where something simply would not sink in, moments when I became annoyed with myself for forgetting something we had covered only a few days earlier and plenty of occasions when I could understand exactly what my tutor was explaining but could not put it into practice when she asked me a question. Left entirely to myself, those were precisely the moments when I had abandoned language learning in the past. It was easy to close an app when I became frustrated and tell myself I would come back to it later.

A tutor changes that dynamic completely because there is another person there who can see the difference between struggling and failing, then slow down and help you through it. Those tiny little corrections where I had mixed up the masculine and feminine again, the repetition using different objects inside the core sentence, the easy back and forth we started to develop, all made a huge difference. My tutor would recognise when I was getting frustrated, slow things down, explain something from another angle or spend longer on a particular point until I understood it. Just as importantly, she could see progress that I often could not. When I felt as though I was getting nowhere, she would ask me a question and I would answer, something I could not have done before I started this process.

That encouragement may seem like a small thing, but it was actually really important. More than that though, it made me realise that not every word or phrase had to be perfect for me to just try it. I stopped feeling as though every wrong answer was evidence that I was bad at Spanish and started treating it as something we could correct and move on from. Over time, that made me much more willing to attempt an answer even when I wasn’t entirely sure I had it right.

That immersion also made speaking unavoidable. Because my tutor was a native Spanish speaker, as much of our interaction as possible happened in Spanish from the beginning. I couldn’t spend five minutes constructing the perfect answer in my head or wait until I was completely certain before responding. I had to listen to Spanish being spoken naturally, deal with questions phrased differently from the way I had learned them and gradually adjust as she spoke more quickly or used the everyday expressions a native speaker would actually use.

At first I needed plenty of English to fill in the gaps, and sometimes I had absolutely no idea what she had just said, but that became part of the learning rather than a reason to retreat. There was another person sitting there waiting for an answer, so I had to take what I understood, work out what I wanted to say and give it a go. If it was wrong, we corrected it. If I got stuck, she helped me through it. If I managed to make myself understood despite mangling the grammar, the conversation simply continued.

Gradually, that changed the way speaking Spanish felt. It stopped being something I had to remember and then perform perfectly, and became something I was allowed to practise imperfectly. The lessons gave me a place to get things wrong, laugh about it, try again and discover that I could still communicate even when every sentence wasn’t technically perfect. That combination of immersion, encouragement and regular human interaction did more than teach me the mechanics of Spanish; it gave me the confidence to start trusting what I knew enough to actually use it.

What Progress Actually Looked Like

None of this meant I was suddenly fluent in Spanish. Far from it. I was still very much a novice, there were huge gaps in my vocabulary, I still made plenty of mistakes and there were more than enough moments when something was said to me and my brain would simply refuse to cooperate.

If a conversation became too complicated or my tutor started speaking at her natural full speed, I could very quickly reach the limits of what I knew and understood. I still got grammar wrong, mixed up masculine and feminine forms and occasionally constructed sentences the wrong way round.

What had changed was that those gaps no longer made the whole language feel inaccessible. I could hold basic conversations, ask questions, understand the general meaning of what was being said back to me and, crucially, respond without needing to have memorised the exact exchange beforehand. I genuinely can’t explain how that feels as someone who had always thought speaking a second language was beyond my reach. I still missed words and sometimes needed people to repeat themselves or slow down, but I could usually follow enough of the context to understand what was happening.

More importantly, I no longer needed to understand every single word to know what was being asked of me. I could recognise the structure, pick up the important words and use what I had learned about the language to start building a response. Even something as basic as understanding whether the answer needed ser or estar meant I was thinking about the sentence itself rather than desperately searching my memory for something I had learned by rote.

This was the result of working one-to-one with a native-speaking tutor, and being able to make an attempt, even if it was imperfect, then correct it afterwards was a huge milestone for me.

That was the real progress. My Spanish was still limited and imperfect, but I could finally use it well enough to communicate, and that was something I had never been able to do before.

Did It Actually Work In Real Life?

The real test, of course, was what happened when I took that imperfect Spanish out of the classroom and back to Spain. A lazy Sunday morning spent wandering the little art market outside the Museo de Bellas Artes in Seville gave me the perfect opportunity. Local artists had set up their easels in the courtyard and hung paintings along the railings of the museum, making it feel as much like an open-air gallery as a market. People wandered slowly between the stalls, stopping to chat under the awnings protecting them from the sun, and I was enjoying listening to the Spanish being spoken around me, picking out words and phrases I recognised.

I stopped in front of one I particularly liked, a colourful impressionist street scene of Seville, and asked the artist how much it was. This was one of the stock phrases that most people know and can repeat, but I understood the answer without having to consciously translate every word back into English first. I even managed to tell him I loved it, and somehow that simple exchange turned into a conversation.

I’m realistic. I know I was hardly dazzling him with fluent Spanish. I was stumbling over a few words and taking slightly longer to answer than anyone who actually knew what they were doing would, and I was under no illusion that my grammar or pronunciation was perfect. He was also being extraordinarily kind and patient, giving me the time to find the words and slowing his own Spanish down enough for me to follow. None of that really mattered though. I was having the conversation.

A few months earlier I could probably have asked how much the painting cost because that was exactly the sort of useful phrase I would have memorised beforehand. The moment he answered and then said anything else, though, I would have been finished. This time I could listen to him, pick out the words I knew, understand the context around the ones I didn’t and work out enough of what he meant to respond.

That was what all those one-to-one lessons had been building towards. Talking regularly with my tutor had given me the foundations of the language, but it had also got me used to the much messier reality of speaking with another human being. Questions were not always phrased exactly as I expected, conversations changed direction, I had to respond without rehearsing first and sometimes I simply had to take a chance on a sentence and see whether it worked. And this time, it did.

Not perfectly, obviously. I was still obviously a novice speaking to a native Spanish speaker who was generously meeting me considerably more than halfway. But a few months earlier I couldn’t have done it at all, and that was the part I was quietly rather proud of.

For me, that is where learning a language becomes really worthwhile for travellers. It isn’t about showing off how fluent you are or worrying whether every verb ending is perfect; it is about making the effort to meet someone in their own language, even if all you can manage at first is a slightly messy attempt. I’ve always been a huge advocate for travellers learning at least a few words and phrases before they arrive somewhere. After more than twenty-five years of doing exactly that, this was the first time I felt I had genuinely gone beyond them.

Most people recognise that effort for what it is. They slow down, help when you get stuck, correct you occasionally and, more often than not, seem genuinely pleased that you are trying. Sometimes the result is nothing more dramatic than a warmer exchange with a waiter or an easier conversation in a shop, but sometimes it gives you a moment of genuine connection with someone you would never otherwise have spoken to.

That is what makes the effort worthwhile. Learning even a little more of the language allows you to participate in a destination rather than always expecting the people who live there to communicate on your terms. My Spanish did not need to be fluent to make that Sunday morning in Seville richer; it just needed to be good enough to give me the confidence to try.

How Much Does Preply Cost?

There is no single fixed price for learning with Preply because each tutor sets their own rate. At the time of writing, Preply lists the average cost of Spanish lessons at around $17 per 50-minute lesson, although many tutors charge more depending on their experience, specialism and demand, with $30, $40 or $50+ lessons also common on the platform.

What you actually spend therefore depends not only on the tutor you choose, but on how many lessons you want or need. Someone taking one lesson a week will obviously spend much less than someone learning intensively several times a week, and the overall cost can vary quite considerably depending on the pace you want to maintain.

Before starting regular lessons with a tutor, you book a trial lesson separately. After that, Preply works on a subscription basis tied to that specific tutor rather than through a general membership fee for the platform. Subscriptions run in 28-day cycles, with a minimum of four lessons per cycle, and the total amount you pay is based on your tutor’s rate and the number of lessons in your plan.

You can increase or decrease the number of lessons in your subscription, buy additional lessons if you need them, pause your renewal or cancel altogether. If you want to learn with more than one tutor at the same time, each tutor requires a separate subscription.

For someone taking one lesson a week, the cost may be relatively modest; for someone who wants several lessons a week and more intensive progress, it will naturally be much higher.

What I Liked About Preply

What I liked most about Preply was that it made language learning feel human. That sounds almost ridiculously simple, but it was the one thing missing from nearly every way I had tried to learn before. Self-learning apps could give me vocabulary, and those little essential phrases sections at the back of guidebooks had saved me more times than I can count, but neither could listen to me, respond to what I had actually said, correct me when I got something wrong or encourage me when I was clearly starting to lose patience with myself.

Having another person on the other side of the conversation changed the whole experience. My tutor could hear when my pronunciation was off, tell when I had understood a rule and when I was just taking an educated guess, and change the way she explained something when it was not sinking in. She could also do something no exercise ever could: recognise when I was making progress before I had noticed it myself. That human-to-human element was easily the biggest strength for me because it turned learning from something I was doing alone into something responsive, flexible and much harder to give up on.

And that personalisation started from the moment I signed up. The questions Preply asked seemed simple enough, but they were already narrowing down thousands of tutors based on my existing level, what I wanted to achieve, how quickly I hoped to improve, the way I preferred to learn and when I was realistically available. By the time I was looking through tutor profiles, I was not just scrolling through an enormous directory; I was choosing from people who already broadly matched what I had said I needed.

I genuinely liked that I had a trial lesson too, because it gave me the chance to make sure I had made the right choice before committing to regular lessons. A questionnaire can match you according to experience, availability and learning goals, but it cannot tell you whether you actually get on with someone. If you are going to spend hours making mistakes in front of a person, getting corrected and occasionally staring at them as though they have just invented an entirely new form of grammar to torment you with, personality matters.

Once I had found a tutor I felt comfortable with, that personalisation continued into every lesson. She could slow down when I was struggling, push me when I was getting too comfortable, explain something in a completely different way when I wasn’t getting it and spend longer on the things that kept tripping me up. There was no fixed programme dragging me on to the next exercise simply because I had reached the end of the previous one; the lesson could change depending on what I actually needed at that moment.

That also meant I was speaking Spanish long before I would ever have considered myself ready to do it. From the beginning, my tutor used as much Spanish as I could realistically cope with, filling in the gaps with English when necessary and gradually increasing both the amount and the speed as I improved. There was no comfortable period where I could quietly learn everything first and promise myself I would start speaking when I knew enough. Speaking was part of the learning from the start.

And yes, at times that was difficult, especially when my tutor started speaking more naturally and my brain was still several words behind trying to work out what she had said, but that was exactly the practice I had always been missing. I had to listen properly, pick out the words I recognised, use the context to make sense of the ones I didn’t and come up with some kind of response without having five minutes to construct the perfect sentence in my head.

Over time, that was what started turning recognition into actual use. That, for me, was the big difference between learning with a real tutor and learning entirely on my own. It is one thing to see a word written down and know what it means; it is quite another to hear it buried inside a sentence spoken naturally by someone else, understand enough of that sentence to know what is being asked and then respond before the conversation moves on. Working one-to-one meant practising that messy middle ground repeatedly until having a conversation stopped feeling quite so intimidating.

I also liked that Preply’s human-led approach didn’t mean giving up the useful parts of digital self-learning. I still had personalised grammar and vocabulary exercises, Daily Exercises, Lesson Insights and Scenario Practice to work through between lessons, so I could revise what we had covered, reinforce weaker areas and keep Spanish ticking over when I was studying on my own. Those tools felt familiar after years of using self-learning apps, but now they were only one part of a much broader way of learning rather than being expected to do everything themselves.

For me, that was probably the best way to describe the overall experience. I did not lose the convenience of self-learning technology; I gained everything it had been missing. The digital and AI-powered tools were still there when I wanted them, but they supported a real relationship with a tutor who knew what I was trying to achieve, recognised where I was struggling and could help me turn what I was learning into something I could actually use.

What Could Be Better?

Preply has been genuinely useful for me, and I think the fact that I was finally able to take what I had learned into a real conversation in Spain says far more than any list of features ever could. There was nothing about the platform that fundamentally did not work for me, but there are still a couple of things I think anyone considering it should know.

The first is that finding the right tutor matters enormously. Preply does a good job of narrowing the field based on your level, goals, availability and the way you want to learn, but no questionnaire can completely predict whether two personalities are going to work well together. I was fortunate to find a tutor I clicked with, but someone else may need to try more than one before finding the right fit.

That is not really a flaw in Preply so much as part of any one-to-one learning experience. A tutor can be extremely experienced and still not suit the way you learn, just as someone else might respond brilliantly to a teaching style that leaves you completely lost. This is why I think the trial lesson is so important. It gives you the chance to see how someone teaches, how comfortable you feel making mistakes around them and whether the relationship feels like something you could genuinely learn from.

The other consideration is cost, but I think that depends almost entirely on what you actually want from language learning. If you are going on holiday and only want to learn how to say hello, order a beer and ask where the bathroom is, then realistically it is hard to justify paying for regular one-to-one tuition. A phrasebook, free resource or inexpensive self-learning app will probably do that job perfectly well.

But that is not really what Preply is designed for. You are paying for a real person’s time, attention and expertise, along with lessons shaped around your own ability and goals. For me, the value was in having someone listen to me, correct me, explain why I was getting things wrong, adapt the lessons as I improved and give me the conversation practice I had never managed to get from learning on my own.

Once I started looking at it that way, comparing the price directly with a cheap self-learning app stopped making much sense. They can overlap in what they teach, but they are not really offering the same thing. If all you want is a few useful phrases, Preply is probably more than you need. If you genuinely want to learn a language well enough to use it, though, paying for personalised one-to-one tuition becomes a much easier expense to justify.

Is Preply Worth It?

I don’t think Preply will be worth it for everyone, and I don’t think it needs to be. If all you want is enough Spanish to order a meal, ask for directions and get through the basics of a holiday, then paying for regular one-to-one lessons is probably more than you need. There are plenty of free resources, phrasebooks and self-learning apps that can get you surprisingly far with that, and for some travellers that will be absolutely enough.

But if you actually want to learn the language, rather than just borrow a few useful phrases from it, then I think Preply becomes much easier to justify. It’s just like learning any other skill. Nobody really questions paying for driving lessons if they want to learn to drive. You can learn the theory on your own, but at some point you need someone experienced beside you while you actually learn how to do it.

Learning a language runs on the same principle. If it is a skill you want, then the cost is an investment in that. I have always had a few memorised phrases from different languages, enough to say hello and thank you, enough to be polite, but with Preply I was paying for a skilled tutor’s time and expertise to take me beyond that and actually teach me how to use the language.

So yes, Preply can be a significant cost in time and money, but when you look at it as an investment in a lifelong skill, the cost starts to feel very different. Learning another language is something I have wanted to do for years, and if I can keep building on what I have learned now, it is a skill I will potentially carry with me for the rest of my life. I will use it every time I return to Spain, every time I travel somewhere Spanish is spoken and, hopefully, in conversations I would never have been able to have otherwise. That feels very different from paying for something I use for a few months and then forget about.

A few months ago I could memorise a Spanish question and hope desperately that nobody answered it in an unexpected way. Now I can have a basic conversation with a native Spanish speaker, understand enough of what comes back to follow it and come up with an answer of my own. Slowly and imperfectly, admittedly, but I can do it. That is enough for me to know that something has changed.

I am still nowhere near fluent, and I have a huge amount left to learn, but I no longer feel as though speaking another language is something permanently beyond me. I have the foundations now, I understand far more about how Spanish actually works and, most importantly, I am willing to use it. So if all you want is a handful of useful phrases for your next trip, Preply is probably more than you need. If you want to invest the time and money into learning a language as a genuine lifelong skill, and you know you would benefit from having a real person teach, correct, encourage and actually talk to you, then yes, I think it absolutely can be worth it.

Why Preply Worked For Me

What Preply gave me was something I had never managed to get from years of phrasebooks, memorised vocabulary and self-learning apps: a way to actually learn a language with another person at the centre of the process. The one-to-one lessons, the ability to find a tutor who suited the way I needed to learn, the regular conversation and the personalised feedback all combined to make Spanish feel less like something I was studying from the outside and more like something I could genuinely start using.

That human element is what made the biggest difference. Preply still gave me all the useful digital tools I would expect from a modern language-learning platform, but they supported the learning rather than becoming the learning. The real progress came from having a tutor who could listen, adapt, explain, encourage, correct and keep the conversation going when I would previously have given up.

And perhaps that is the best reason I can give for recommending it. Preply did not promise me an effortless shortcut to fluency. It gave me a structured, personalised way to start building towards it, with a real person helping me through the difficult bits and giving me somewhere to actually use what I was learning along the way.

If you have ever wanted to become fluent in another language, or simply wished you could move beyond memorising a handful of useful phrases and start having real conversations, go and give Preply a try. Find a tutor who suits you, book a trial lesson and see just how far that first conversation can take you.

This is a paid article written in partnership with Preply with products or services supplied by them. Full editorial integrity is maintained at all times. The views and opinions expressed are entirely the author’s own based on personal experiences when travelling and are honest and factual without any bias.