Learning Spanish for Travel: Preply Review
This article was produced in partnership with Preply. As always, all opinions are our own.
I have been learning Spanish for eight years.
At least, that is what I have been telling myself.
Since our first van trip through South America in 2018, I have tried language apps, studied during an almost year-long trip through Mexico and picked things up during return visits to Latin America and Spain. My app streak is currently more than 1,000 days.
And yet, the thought of an actual conversation with me in Spanish, causes my mind to go completely blank.
I know plenty of words. I understand some basic grammar. I can read menus, signs and simple messages. If someone speaks very, very slowly, I can get the gist of what they are saying.
But having a conversation is different. Having a conversation means finding those words while another person sits there waiting for you to answer. It means understanding a question in real time, putting together a response and saying it out loud before your brain has a chance to retreat to the safety of dos cervezas, por favor.
We are heading back to Central America—specifically Nicaragua—later this year, so I have given myself a challenge: to arrive able to do more than order a beer and decipher a menu. I would love to be able to hold a basic conversation in Spanish.
So, the timing was pretty good when Preply asked us to try its platform. Preply provided the credit for the lessons, but asked for an honest review. So that is what this is: my experience of finding a tutor, taking Spanish lessons and discovering just how little of those eight years of Spanish I could summon when somebody asked me a question.
What is Preply?
Preply is an online platform that connects learners with tutors for one-to-one lessons. Spanish is just one of the subjects available, although it is a fairly significant one: when I searched, there were around 14,000 Spanish tutors on the platform.
That amount of choice initially felt less helpful than it sounds. I didn’t want to inspect 14,000 profiles one by one, and I wasn’t looking for a university lecturer to guide me through every obscure corner of Spanish grammar. My goal was much simpler. I wanted to speak.
More specifically, I wanted to become comfortable enough to have ordinary conversations while travelling: talking about where we are from, asking questions, understanding answers and making it through an interaction without immediately switching back to English.
Finding a Tutor on Preply
Preply starts by asking questions about your goals, current ability, availability, budget and preferred learning style. It then uses those answers to suggest tutors who should be a reasonable match.
This made a daunting number of tutors much more manageable.
Each tutor has a profile with their experience, price, student reviews and a short introductory video. The videos were particularly useful. Qualifications and reviews matter, but when you are about to spend 50 minutes stumbling over basic sentences with a stranger, it also helps to get a sense of whether you will feel comfortable talking to them.
Prices vary quite a lot between tutors, which means there are options for a fairly wide range of budgets.
Once I had found someone who seemed like a good fit, we exchanged a few messages about my level and what I hoped to achieve before booking a trial lesson.
My First Preply Spanish Lesson
The trial lesson gave us a chance to talk about what I wanted from the lessons and how the tutor normally teaches. She explained that she could personalize the classes around my life and focus on functional vocabulary I might actually use as a traveler and parent.
That sounded ideal.
Then we started speaking Spanish.
There was a small, optimistic part of me that thought years of words, phrases and half-remembered grammar might suddenly assemble themselves into fluent Spanish once called upon.
They did not.
I knew that I knew more Spanish, but the words would not come. Simple questions felt surprisingly difficult. I hesitated, froze, and worried so much about making mistakes that I struggled to say much at all.
Eventually, the lesson ended, and I was off the hook.
It was uncomfortable, but also useful. The lesson revealed the fairly large gap between recognizing Spanish in an app and producing it during a real conversation. I had spent years learning Spanish without spending much time actually speaking Spanish.
That sounds obvious when written down.
The Difference Between Knowing Spanish and Speaking It
Language apps have helped me build vocabulary, understand basic sentence structures, and maintain a regular learning habit. I don’t think those hours were totally wasted.
The problem is access.
Seeing a sentence on a screen and selecting the missing word is very different from having someone ask you a question in Spanish and needing to create an answer from scratch. No list of possible responses. There is no friendly cartoon character giving you a moment to think. There is just another human being waiting patiently while every Spanish word you have ever learned scatters somewhere in the back of your brain.
One-to-one lessons put pressure on exactly that weak point. You have to listen, process, recall vocabulary, check the grammar as best you can and then speak. You also get immediate correction on pronunciation and sentence construction.
It was much harder than using an app. That was also the point.
My Second Lesson and Preply’s AI Feedback
By my second lesson, the tutor had a better idea of my ability and where I was getting stuck. I was still finding it difficult, but the lesson felt more focused and I was beginning to settle into the process.
I also turned on Preply’s AI lesson insights. After the class, the platform gave me a recap showing how much each of us had spoken, my speaking speed and some feedback on my performance. At 74 words per minute, my speaking speed was classified as slow.
That checked out.
The feedback also pulled out vocabulary from the lesson, with translations and pronunciation, and highlighted areas I had handled well or needed to practise. I expected this feature to feel a little gimmicky, but it was genuinely useful. A live lesson covers a lot, particularly when most of your mental capacity is being used to construct one basic sentence. Having an automatic summary gives you something concrete to review afterwards.
More importantly, I could already feel myself becoming slightly less afraid of speaking.
By Lesson Three Something Had Changed
The third lesson began with a warm-up before moving into questions about my actual life. This was the closest thing so far to the sort of conversation I want to have while travelling.
I was still making plenty of mistakes. I was still searching for words. I was definitely not speaking beautiful Spanish.
But I was speaking.
I worried less about getting every sentence right, which made me answer more quickly. Answering more quickly made the exchange feel more natural. By the end of the lesson, I had spoken 1,181 words—substantially more than in the previous classes—and the statistics backed up how the lesson had felt.
It was only three lessons, but there was a noticeable change between the first class, when I could barely bring myself to speak, and the third, when I was forming longer sentences and trying to express real ideas.
What I Liked About Preply
The strongest part of Preply is not a complicated feature. It is having a real person who makes you use the language.
For me, the main benefits were:
- The tutor-matching process. The initial questions quickly narrowed an enormous selection down to tutors who suited my goals, learning style and budget.
- Personalised lessons. We worked on vocabulary and conversations connected to my real life rather than following a generic course designed around an imaginary trip to the post office.
- Real-time conversation practice. This was the missing piece in the years I had spent using language apps.
- Immediate feedback. My tutor could correct mistakes and pronunciation as they happened.
- The AI lesson insights. The summaries, vocabulary and speaking statistics made it easy to see what we had covered and gave me something useful to revisit afterwards.
- Flexibility. Being able to compare tutors and schedule lessons online makes the process much less daunting than committing to a traditional course.
The lessons also turned out to be enjoyable. I had put off formal Spanish classes partly because I imagined they would be boring, difficult and expensive. The lessons were certainly challenging, but they didn’t feel like sitting through a grammar lecture.
What Could Be Better?
I have been genuinely impressed with the platform, although there are a couple of additions I would like to see.
Group lesson functionality could be useful, particularly for couples or families who want to learn together. I would also welcome even more ways to filter and search through tutors. Preply already does a great job of filtering the options based on languages, country, specialty area and much more. However with thousands of tutors available, additional search tools would make it easier to refine that list even further.
These are fairly minor criticisms. The existing platform is intuitive, the tutor profiles contain the information I needed, and booking and taking the lessons was straightforward.
Can You Become Fluent With Preply?
Not in three lessons.
I can confirm this because, after three lessons, I cannot speak fluent Spanish.
Preply is not a shortcut around the time and repetition required to learn a language. A tutor cannot download Spanish into your brain while you sit there nodding. You still need to attend regularly, review what you have learned and be willing to sound a bit foolish along the way.
What the lessons can do is make you practise the skill that many app-based learners avoid: actually talking to somebody.
There’s plenty of research into the benefits of learning with a tutor, particularly when it comes to things like motivation and engagement. My experiment highlighted the fairly obvious reason why: there’s nowhere to hide.
For someone starting from scratch, a tutor can provide structure and personalised guidance. For someone like me, who has accumulated years of disconnected vocabulary and grammar but struggles to use it, the value is in turning that passive knowledge into something accessible.
Is Preply Worth It?
The question I wanted to answer was not whether Preply could make me fluent in three classes. It was whether I would keep using it once this review was finished.
The answer is yes.
After years of starting, stopping and maintaining an impressive app streak without becoming remotely conversational, the lessons feel like a practical way forward. The difference after three classes is modest but real: I am not fluent, but I am more comfortable. I am less worried about mistakes. I can respond a little faster and speak in longer sentences.
Most importantly, I am finally practising Spanish outside a language app—with another person, in real time, when I don’t know the question in advance.
The actual test will come when we arrive in Nicaragua in a few months. By then, I hope I can do more than order a beer and read the menu.
Hasta luego!