A frustrated traveller, booked solid language schools, took a chance on an online tutoring platform instead — and stumbled onto a cheaper, better way to learn a language. Writing for The Guardian Travel, author Annabel Abbs hired Anna, a political sciences student at the University of Rouen Normandy, found via Apprentus for €19 an hour. Language schools in the city were quoting €60 an hour, and their classrooms were full anyway.
The setup: 10 hours of one-to-one conversation spread over five days, with every lesson conducted on foot around Rouen. That format mattered. A study in Nature suggests movement boosts concentration and memory — and Abbs had felt the difference herself, having spent a dreary winter in Montpellier pinned to a plastic chair in a class of 12, three hours a day, with little to show for it.
Walking the talk worked. Car-free medieval quarters, riverside paths along the Seine and the Place du Vieux-Marché (where Joan of Arc met her end) doubled as classrooms. Rainy afternoons were spent in tea houses like Dame Cakes, chatting over goûter — the French between-meals snack tradition. One lesson even covered Rouen's bus network while discussing Senegal's matrilineal history of priestesses and queens, since Anna's family heritage brought a second layer of cultural learning. Free entry to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, home to France's largest impressionist collection outside Paris, rounded out the week.
The logistics were pleasingly simple and cheap for British travellers: a Newhaven–Dieppe ferry, then a one-hour train to Rouen, with a combined return ferry-train ticket costing £65. A studio apartment in the historic centre ran under £60 a night. Total spend for six days — accommodation, food, transport and tuition — came to just over £600.
The results went beyond grammar. By the final day Abbs was speaking French for five unbroken minutes by the Seine, and a shop assistant mistook her for a local. Her verdict: two hours of daily one-to-one tuition was the sweet spot, leaving time for French novels, radio and the self-set challenge of talking to strangers.
For anyone wanting to dust off school French without the price tag and cramped classrooms of a language school, this is a genuinely useful template. Pick a walkable French city, book a student tutor through an online platform, keep the classes outdoors, and you get a guide, conversation partner and teacher for a fraction of the usual cost. Just manage expectations — Anna had signed up expecting to help kids with homework and found herself teaching someone old enough to be her mother. They hugged it out at the ferry anyway.
