I'm not a huge fan of the sales-talky, motivational speaker tone that Benny uses. [Also what I don't like about Tim Ferris]. That being said, I think the basic message of, "the way to learn a new language is to speak it as much as humanly possible", is important enough that it deserves to be repeated despite it being pretty obvious.

I spent eight months studying French for a few hours every Saturday morning in a class and a few hours a week doing homework, I felt like I was making good progress in the class but without actually being able to usefully speak French. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had a language learning experience like this.

The thing is - I could (kind of) use two past tenses and one future tense while still stumbling over basic introductions and asking for directions. This doesn't make any sense from a utility point of view.

So I hired a succession of French teachers on Skype to have the same basic conversations with - the kind of basic transactional or quick introduction "speed dating" type conversations that I'd actually be likely to have with native speakers on a frequent basis. Surprise, surprise, my French abilities got better by leaps and bounds. It cost less than I was paying for the classes as well.

I now think that organised group classes are a waste of money for adult learners. I can find native language French teachers that do classes on Skype for less than £10 / hour, which is about the price of group classes with 6-10 people in them. Spending an hour which is 45 mins me talking and 15 minutes of corrections has done more for my spoken French than an hour of group classes where I actually have maybe 5 minutes cumulatively to speak.

Yeah, sometimes it is a little boring spending an hour having conversations about hotel bookings and flight reservations, but I can actually do those things pretty confidently after practicing them for two hours.