AI partner or human tutor

We build an AI phone partner, so you can guess which answer we would like to give. The useful answer depends on what you want from the hour. For speaking, the research points at two things above the rest: how much you talk, and how often you fix your own sentence.

What makes speaking improve

The linguist Paul Nation splits a well-planned language course into what he calls four strands. About half the time goes to listening and speaking to get meaning across, about a quarter goes to getting faster with what you already know, and no more than a quarter goes to studying grammar and words on purpose. In that plan, most of the hour is conversation about something real.

Correction matters too. In 2010, Lyster and Saito pooled 15 classroom studies with 827 learners. Corrections that gave the learner a hint and let the learner say the sentence again worked better than corrections that simply supplied the right form. The learner saying it again made the difference.

Some mistakes are hard to notice even when someone corrects them. In a study by Mackey, Gass and McDonough (2000), learners recognized most of the corrections about vocabulary and most of the corrections about pronunciation, but only about one in eight of the corrections about grammar. A partner who quietly repeats your sentence the right way may fix your grammar without you noticing, so a grammar mistake has to be pointed out plainly.

What an AI partner does well

An AI partner doesn’t run out of patience. You can ask about 은 and 는 for the tenth time, and the answer comes back as calmly as it did the first time.

The partner is also there at the hour you have. You can call at eleven at night or at six in the morning, and on a busy day a call can be ten minutes long.

Our partners remember. Your partner keeps track of what you talked about and what you got wrong, so next week’s call can start from last week’s mistake.

At our prices an hour of calls costs about $2.50 to $5.50, against $15 to $40 for an hour with a tutor. At that price, a call every day stays affordable.

With an AI there is also no one to impress. Saying a sentence wrong costs you nothing, so you can try the sentence you are not sure about instead of the one you know is safe.

What a person gives you

A person reacts for real. When a Korean friend laughs, your joke worked on a Korean. When a Korean friend frowns, a real Korean found your sentence confusing, and that frown tells you something an AI can only imitate.

A person in Korea hears the language every day. A tutor in Seoul knows which words came into use this year and which already sound old.

A person can also check work that needs a human judge: a cover letter in Korean, an essay for a test, the toast you want to give at a Korean friend’s wedding.

What we would do

We built the AI partner because we think an AI partner should take most of your speaking hours: the daily calls, and the sentences you are not sure about yet.

A person is worth paying for when you need something checked by someone who speaks Korean every day. If you can afford one tutor hour a week, you will get more out of that hour after a week of calls, because you arrive with questions from the calls and spend the hour on the answers.

What we don’t know yet

Our first service has Korean speakers practicing English by phone. Pick Up Korean turns the same calls around, and we haven’t yet talked with enough learners of Korean to say how they compare with our learners of English. When we can say, we will write it here.