Language by skype - complete access to a personal tutor

You may have noticed the plethora of online language courses. It's marvellous. What has taken all of this material a step further is the availability of Skype.

When language courses first became available online, at the beginning of the 2000s, I personally was involved in student tuition programmes, and my director became so excited at the prospect of online learning, that he wanted to abandon class learning altogether. He envisaged being able to fire his group of teachers in the near future. The teachers were good, were an asset for the school, but far more expensive than equally well-qualified teachers available online.

One of the packages that I studied at that time offered UNLIMITED personal teacher access for about €100 per year, as long as a minimum of 200 students registered. Although this isn't strictly the same concept as classroom teaching, this represented, for my director, a saving of at least 50% on classic language classes. For a man obsessed with saving money, he became obsessed with online learning, and especially with languages, which, up until that point, consumed a huge amount of class time and energy, far more than any other classes going on.

Class vs. Online

Do languages really justify such a large number of classes? For most people, the hard answer is yes.

If you do a class in accounts or marketing, or even any company case study, you'll have first of all a finite amount of material. You have no problem limiting a certain number of hours, to a certain level of learning required to achieve a certain mastery of a subject.

With languages you can achieve and establish levels of progress and competence. There is even a standardised level of competence available -  A1, B1 etc. The problem is that these levels are at best rudimentary and academic. What people really want to achieve is a mastery of all of the language skills - listening, speaking, writing, reading - to be able to do anything you want in that language. If it isn't your native language you have a lot of catching up to do. It's not just a problem of vocabulary. It's a problem of reactivity and accuracy. Only through hours of practice can you reach the levels of a native speaker. It's hours and hours of practice.

So this large number of hours is necessary for most people. In a typical class situation it is easy to be distracted, and to lose the intensity of the learning experience. Sometimes the group is too big, or the levels are too varied for a student to profit from a class sufficiently. Often the teacher has too much physical distance from the student to be able to reagain any lost intensity.

First came the telephone, then came online teaching. Then came Skype. Through Skype you can intrude as a teacher or a student on your correspondent at any time, arranged or not. The physical intensity is assured. The pressure to maintain the scale of the repetition exercises is never far away. The repetition can be formalised, by using Skype as a classic educational medium, with the teacher right in the face of the student, or it can be used as a casual contact mechanism. It can be timed and recorded.

At Challenge Europe we have been offering courses and classes through professional teachers, tutors and instructors since 2002. Our staff have had many years of experience before this. So whoever comes onto our courses can now access this teaching at a click. You chose the rythmn, you choose what you want to achieve. Your achievements and targets will be continually assessed by your teacher.

This intensity might be expensive, but it isn't. Due to the freeness and flexibility of Skype and the internet, it is unarguably the cheapest way to have language instruction. You don't have to go anywhere, you have a dedicated personal teacher who wants you to achieve maximum progress.

Tariffs - they start from £18 an hour. Convert it into your local currency, and you'll see what a bargain it is.