Ever feel like you’re not sure how to get the most from your online language lessons with a tutor? Here’s my guide to make sure that your online language lessons are as useful as they can be.

In January 2018, I gave one language in particular a little extra focus time: Portuguese. I’m working with Lusa Language School on this article. They kindly gave me 10 online Portuguese lessons in a month, which is the inspiration for this sponsored article.

Lusa Language School is a Portuguese language school in the heart of Lisbon. They offer Portuguese courses both in Lisbon and online. Judging by their Instagram, there’s plenty of extra social activities beyond the lessons too when you study in Lisbon!

My online tutor was Diogo, who really helped to highlight and work on improving my common mistakes with Portuguese. Mainly that involves using Spanish words; vowel pronunciation; and lack of general vocabulary, which is what tended to lead towards me using Spanish words…!

Over our 10 lessons, I definitely felt more confident and able with Portuguese, and look forward to visiting Portugal some day soon to put it all into practice.

Anyway, enough about me and my Portuguese. Here’s what I learnt about how to make the most of your online lessons from my online lessons with Lusa Language School.

Count On Yourself

Especially when we’re unsure of our own language learning abilities, we have a tendency to book a lesson with a tutor and sit back and expect the language to just magically go into our brains simply because we’re spending time with a tutor.

The truth is that if that time isn’t valuably used by us, then we won’t be learning anything, or very little at most.

The first step to get the most from your online language lessons with a tutor is to recognise your role in your own success and progress.

Your tutor is there to guide you and inspire you, but your success really lies with you and the decisions you make towards that success.

I found that having my lessons booked in advance proved a great help in making sure that I made time for my lessons.

Ask for Corrections

One of the real benefits of having time with an online tutor is the chance to speak. For many of us, especially if we’re looking for online lessons, we don’t have the chance to speak and practice that language in real life all too often.

However, if you’re chatting away for a whole hour and your tutor isn’t offering you any corrections of tips for areas of improvement then you’re not getting as much from your tutor time as you could be.

Every tutor is different and every learner is different too. You may prefer a tutor who corrects you as you go, or you may prefer a tutor that allows you to finish what you’re saying before allowing time for corrections and improvements. Decide which suits you best and don’t be afraid to ask your tutor to correct you as you prefer.

Typically, I prefer corrections after a chance to speak and finish what I want to say. However, with a language like Portuguese that in the past I’ve learnt pretty ‘slap-dash’, it was important for me with my lessons with Lusa Language School that Diogo corrected me as I made mistakes so I could see exactly where I was going wrong.

Record Your Calls

You may never need to go back to re-watch every single minute of every single call, but especially when tutors are explaining mistakes or covering important bits, ask if you can record your calls for later reference.

Most online lessons are an hour, which is a long time to stay completely on form speaking a different language and learning actively. By recording your calls, you’re giving yourself a chance to go back and review what your tutor is correcting, and with their correct pronunciation too rather than you guessing how stuff should sound when you stumble upon your notes down the line.

Skype now allows you to do this direct within the application, which is a great feature to make use of!

Of course, it’s important here that you ask and let tutors know each time you choose to record your call.

Review Your Notes

As your tutor is correcting you, they’ll likely be adding notes to the Skype chat or a Google Doc.

When I try and make my own thorough notes during a lesson, I’m never getting as much from the tutor as I could be. So I don’t do this anymore. Instead, I make my notes after an online lesson.

Start by reviewing your tutor’s notes actively in your study time. Make time to do this. Having 1 lesson a week and time to go over stuff is better than rushing ahead with multiple lessons a week if you have no time to check in to work on improving your mistakes.

I found that reviewing notes from my lessons with Diogo was surprisingly helpful at reminding me of the things we’d learnt in a lesson, especially when we’d covered pronunciation mistakes I’d made and Diogo had given me extra words and examples of the sound in context.

For each lesson, I made some review notes by simply copying my tutor’s Skype notes that I wanted to remember or study again and adding translations and further examples where necessary.

Put it into Practice!

When you’ve made your final notes from your lesson, put it into practice and write full sentences in context, perhaps even record yourself saying them.

One thing I love about online lessons is when tutors give homework. Yes, the word brings memories of school flooding back but homework is good!

Homework forces you to connect again with the language in between your lessons. Remember the first step I shared – recognising your role in your own success – it’s not always easy to find the time outside of lessons to study. Homework gives you that focus knowing that your tutor will be waiting on the results.

One homework that Diogo set a few times for me was to write a longer text based on what we’d been learning and speaking about that lesson. This worked so well.

However, even if your tutor doesn’t set homework, it’s still worth finding the motivation to put what you learn from your lesson and your notes into practice.

Take it back to your tutor

When you have created something – a written text or recorded spoken example – whether it was homework or not, share it with your tutor.

This gives you a chance to ask for more corrections and consequently improve even more. This is what your tutor is there for.

When Diogo had given me a homework to write things, we’d always start the following lesson reviewing this and working on improving it, Diogo explaining my mistakes so I knew how to improve next time. It really helped.

Rather than have a tutor correct stuff outside of lessons and then simply send it to you, if you can, it’s worth doing this together in your lesson time so you can actively see where the mistakes are and how they can be made better.

Learn Portuguese with Lusa Language School

As I mentioned up top, this post is sponsored by Lusa Language School, who I studied Portuguese with in January.

My lessons were a great boost to my Portuguese and I can definitely recommend learning with them.