Yes, you can practise a language with a general AI chatbot, and it is a good tool for it. It will hold a conversation at the level you ask for, rephrase what you got wrong, and keep going as long as you keep typing. What a companion does differently is not a matter of which model is cleverer: it is wiring, meaning who starts, what carries over between conversations, whether anything counts the week, and where the thing lives.
The first half of this page is about making a chatbot work well, because it does. The second half is about that wiring.
What a chatbot does well
A general assistant is patient, available at any hour, and willing to talk about anything. It can explain a grammar point when you ask, then go back to chatting. It can play a role (a shopkeeper, a colleague, a landlord) so you can rehearse a situation before you meet it. It can write at whatever level you set, and many can talk back by voice as well as text. For a lot of people, that is the first conversation partner they have ever had in the language, and it is often free to try.
Instructions that make it better practice
Put these at the top of a new conversation, and set the level to yours. They are written in English here; you can give them in the language you are practising, which is itself practice.
Talk to me only in the language I am learning, at A2 level, in short sentences, and if I do not understand, simplify rather than switch to English. This matters more than it looks. Without it, an assistant can drift upward into the language it writes best rather than the language you can read, or switch languages at the first sign of trouble, which is the moment you most needed it not to.
When I get something wrong, do not give me a list of errors: say my sentence back correctly and carry on. A list at the end of a turn is a document. A rephrasing inside the reply is something you hear, and it keeps the conversation going.
End every message with a question. Left alone, an assistant answers and stops, and the next sentence then has to be one you also invented. A question at the end means your work is answering, which is the work a conversation is made of.
Correct one thing per message, the most important one. A patient assistant will otherwise flag every article and every accent, and twelve corrections teach little, because you cannot hold twelve.
And at the end of a session, ask it to list the mistakes you repeated and to say nothing about the ones you made once. Repeated is the useful word. A one-off slip and a pattern look the same inside a conversation, and only the pattern is worth your time.
That is a real practice tool, and you should use it. What follows is what it is usually not set up to do.
Who writes first
A chatbot usually waits, unless you set it up to do otherwise. That is not a flaw, it is what an assistant is: something that answers when you ask. So a session usually begins with you deciding that now is when you practise. On a good week that is easy. The question is the ordinary Tuesday, when the app stays closed and nothing tells you it did.
A companion can begin, within fixed limits: only in a chat you have already written in and never inside your quiet hours. A new conversation from one companion starts at most once a day and four times a week; beyond that, a companion may write to wish you luck with something you mentioned was coming, or to ask afterwards how it went, and the weekly letter comes on Sunday, or on Monday if Sunday was missed. If a new conversation goes unanswered, there is one follow-up at most, and only if you switched follow-ups on in settings. It cannot make you answer. It is a message that arrives, and a message that arrives gets read differently from an intention you have to have.
It also lives in Telegram, already on your phone and your desktop, with text and voice notes both ways. A conversation that sits where your other conversations sit does not need an occasion.
What carries over
Many chatbots now have memory features that carry details from earlier conversations into later ones, and they are useful. The difference with a companion is less about whether anything is remembered and more about what shape it takes. A general assistant is one tool for many purposes, and practising a language is one thread among many that you open and steer.
A companion is one character in one chat, and practising with you is all it is for. What you tell it builds its memory of you: you mention a move, and a fortnight later you are asked how the flat is. Being asked again about the thing you struggled to say is how the words you reached for come back a second time. From the settings page you can download what a companion knows, make it forget, or delete everything.
Corrections work the same way. Your messages are read for patterns rather than typos, and at most two patterns a week are raised, inside the reply. That needs something looking across a week rather than within one turn. With a chatbot, what gets flagged depends mostly on what you asked for in your instructions.
What counts the week
A general assistant is not usually built to count your practice. You can scroll back, and scrolling back is not counting.
On Sunday a letter arrives from Parla, one per language, with a PDF: the days you talked, the minutes, the new words, the words that came back, your sentence length, your level, and the two patterns to work on. Nothing asks you for any of that during the week.
Who should pick which
If you want a tutor on demand, to explain a rule, rehearse a scene or check a paragraph, a general chatbot is the more flexible tool. If you are a complete beginner, it is also more forgiving: Parla starts at roughly A2. If what you want is a conversation that keeps happening without you having to set it up each time, that is what a companion is wired for.
The limits are real on both sides. A companion is built on the same kind of model, will sometimes be wrong, and is not a grammar reference or an exam coach. Parla costs 14 euro a month or 99 euro a year, VAT included, after a free week of seven days, with no card needed, and one subscription covers every language and companion.
| An AI chatbot | Parla | |
|---|---|---|
| Who starts | You | You, or the companion within set limits |
| What it is for | Many purposes, language is one | Conversation practice only |
| How you steer it | Your own instructions | Built in, no setup |
| Corrections | Whatever you ask for | At most two patterns a week, inside replies |
| Weekly summary | Usually none unless you ask | A Sunday letter with a PDF |
| Where it lives | Usually its own app or website | Telegram |
