Live Lingua Retail
2024-04-29T16:21:02.000Z
I signed up for a three-month Spanish subscription with private lessons and had a poor experience. At the start I had minimal knowledge of Spanish and wanted to learn enough to function effectively while traveling for months at a time in Latin America. I told them all that in advance, but the teachers assigned to me made little effort to adapt their stock lessons to my interests. One teacher repeatedly departed from her stock slides to chat with me in English during lessons.
Beyond that, neither of my Livelingua teachers made any attempt at all to correct or even point out my faulty pronunciation of several Spanish vowel sounds. In retrospect I find that shocking, nearly to the point of incompetence.
Scheduling was also a hassle. Unless I scheduled lessons a month in advance, it was impossible to schedule lessons at the same time every day, as the calendars for every teacher were nearly full for several weeks out. It was also challenging to find openings of 90-120 minutes at a time in any teacher's schedule, and trying to do more than an hour a day would usually require one session in the afternoon and one in the evening.
Finally, I found the company to be disorganized. After I cancelled my subscription -- and someone confirmed that it had been cancelled -- I continued to receive emails from them as if I was still enrolled, and their "Academic Director" wrote to ask how my classes were going. I wrote back to ask that they remove me from their mailing list. They did not. Three months later, Stacy -- their CEO -- included me in several mass emails offering a spring discount on further classes.
Stacy regrets my experience? If they truly did so, they'd refund every penny I paid Live Lingua, because zero is what their classes were worth to me.
I did not truly realize how bad it was until I enrolled in a Spanish-language school in Cusco, Peru. The director there is a Peruvian man with a masters in language acquisition, and he develops an individualized plan for every student. I'm paying that school $20 an hour for *in-person* private lessons (twice what most schools in Cusco charge). The difference is night and day, and worth it.
I could excuse some of the problems if Live Lingua was charging $10-12 USD an hour for on-line private lessons, like most Spanish schools in Latin America. But at $20 or more per hour, their work is sub-par. I strongly recommend that you avoid them.
I signed up for a three-month Spanish subscription with private lessons and had a poor experience. At the start I had minimal knowledge of Spanish and... More