You practise between language lessons by using the language a little on most of the six days, not by revising for an hour the night before. Ten or fifteen minutes of making your own sentences, written or out loud, usually does more than rereading your notes. Then you bring what went wrong back to your teacher, and you use whatever they explain in the very next day's practice.
That's it in three sentences. The rest is a week you can copy.
What my French taught me about classes
I had French classes for four years, and by the end I was good at it.
Then I stopped practising, and over time it drained away, almost all of it.
Looking back, the classes did their job. What I never had was the habit of using French outside the classroom, so once the classes were over, nothing was holding it up.
If you have a class or a tutor once a week, you're in a better spot than I was. You have someone who can explain things. The question is what happens on the other six days.
How often should you practise a language?
Little and often.
Say you have 90 minutes a week to give it. Six sessions of 15 minutes will usually stick better than one session of 90.
There's real research behind that, and it's old and consistent. It's called the spacing effect: practice that is spaced out tends to beat the same practice done in one go. A 2006 review by Cepeda and colleagues went through hundreds of experiments on it, and the spaced version was usually remembered better.
The second finding is about what you do in those minutes. Roediger and Karpicke showed, also in 2006, that students who were tested on a text remembered more of it a week later than students who simply read it again. Having to remember is the exercise. Rereading feels productive. It does less than it feels like.
So for a language, that means a short bit of producing your own sentences, on most days. Not recognising them. Producing them.
How long is enough? Honestly, whatever you'll still do after a long day at work. Ten minutes you actually do is worth more than an hour you planned.
What to do in the six days between lessons
Here's a week you could try, with the lesson on a Monday. Move it around to fit yours.
- Monday, the lesson. Before you close the call or leave the room, write down the one new thing. One. Not the whole page of notes.
- Tuesday. Use that one thing in a real sentence about your own life. If you covered the past tense, write about your weekend. If you covered the conditional, say what you'd do with a free afternoon.
- Wednesday to Friday. Short conversations about whatever is going on. Ten or fifteen minutes. Every time you want to say something and can't, write the sentence down in your own language.
- Saturday. Read back what you wrote this week. Pick the two or three mistakes that keep coming back.
- Sunday. Turn those into questions for your teacher.
That's it. Nothing heroic.
The days that matter most are Tuesday and Saturday. Tuesday makes the lesson stick. Saturday makes the next lesson useful.
Use your teacher's explanation the very next day
Explanations go stale fast.
On Monday the rule makes perfect sense. By Saturday you remember that there was a rule.
Use it once on Tuesday, in a sentence about you instead of a textbook family going to the beach, and you've already done the retrieval the research above is talking about.
The trick is to pick a topic that forces the structure. Talking about yesterday forces the past. Making plans forces the future. Complaining about your landlord forces, well, a surprising amount of grammar.
Bring your mistakes back to the lesson
This is the part most of us skip, and it's where a lesson gets a lot more useful.
A teacher is a person who can hear which confusion you're in and explain it. That's the thing an hour with them buys you. But they can only work with what you bring, and an hour a week is not much time to find your mistakes from scratch.
So bring a list. The sentences you couldn't say. The word you kept reaching for. The thing you got corrected on three times.
"I keep saying this when I mean that, why?" is a great way to open a lesson. Way better than "so, what are we doing today?"
Where Parla fits in that week
The Wednesday-to-Friday conversations are the hard part to arrange. You need someone to talk to, at ten at night, about nothing in particular.
That's the gap I built Parla for.
You pick a companion. She has her own city and job, and things going on in her week. You write to her on Telegram, in her language, whenever you have ten minutes. When you get something wrong, she rephrases it correctly inside her reply and keeps talking. No red ink, no score.
On Sunday she writes you a letter, and a PDF of it, that reads your week back: the days you talked, the words you used in an earlier week and used again, and the two things to work on.
Those two things are exactly what to take to your teacher. Show them the letter. Ask about the first one. Then use the explanation with her on Tuesday.
That's the loop. Your teacher explains, the chat uses it, the letter shows what still slips, your teacher explains that.
You can also just tell her about your class. Mention that it's on Monday and she might ask you afterwards how it went, which is a pretty good excuse to use the new thing.
The honest part
She's an AI, and she tells you so in her first message.
Her corrections are only suggestions, and she gets things wrong sometimes. One more reason to keep your teacher: if the two of them disagree, believe your teacher.
She won't explain grammar the way your teacher does. Parla is conversation, not a course. If you need the subjunctive taken apart, that's what your lesson is for.
It's mostly text. She answers your voice notes and now and then sends one of her own, but that isn't accent training. Your ear and your pronunciation still need the lesson and some listening of your own.
And it works from roughly A2, once you can get through a simple conversation. If you've just started your first course, your class is the right place for now. Come back in a few months.
It costs 20 euro a month, 99 euro every six months, or 149 euro a year, which is 12.42 euro a month, VAT included. There's a free week first, and you don't need a card to start.
The next gap between two of your lessons is a good week to try it.
If you walk into the following lesson with better questions than usual, it's doing its job.
Sources: Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer, Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis, Psychological Bulletin 132(3), 2006. Roediger and Karpicke, Test-Enhanced Learning, Psychological Science 17(3), 2006.
