Why Most English Classes Are a Waste of Your Time and Money (And What to Do Instead)

You've been paying for a seat in a classroom. You should have been investing in your earbuds.

There. I said it.

And look, before anyone takes offence, this is not an attack on English teachers. Many of them are talented, dedicated people doing their best within a system that is, to put it gently, not particularly well designed for actually teaching people to speak a language. This post is aimed at the system, not the people inside it.

Because the system has a problem. A fairly significant one. And millions of people are spending a lot of money to experience it firsthand every single year.

Let’s Talk About What You’re Actually Paying For

English classes are expensive. Whether you’re enrolling in a language school, booking a course at a local college, or signing up for group lessons online, the costs add up quickly. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars or pounds or euros a year, depending on where you are and what you’re doing.

And what do you get for that money?

You get a fixed schedule that someone else decided. You show up at a time that works for the school, not necessarily for you. You sit in a class, in person or online, with a group of other learners at various levels, from various countries, with various accents, various mistakes, and various ideas about how fast the lesson should move.

And then you spend the next hour listening to a teacher explain grammar rules, doing exercises from a textbook, and occasionally practising a scripted conversation with a classmate whose English is, through no fault of their own, also not very good.

Rinse and repeat, every week, for months or years.

It is genuinely remarkable how little English you actually encounter in the average English class.

The Grammar Problem (Again)

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know that grammar instruction is something of a recurring theme here, and not in a flattering way.

Traditional English classes are built almost entirely around grammar. This is how they have always been structured, it is what the textbooks teach, and it is what most teachers have been trained to deliver. Grammar explanations, grammar exercises, grammar tests. The assumption, baked into the entire model, is that if you understand the rules of English well enough, you will eventually be able to speak it.

As we’ve discussed at length on this blog, this assumption is not supported by the research. Rod Ellis’s work on explicit versus implicit language knowledge makes it very clear: knowing grammar rules and being able to use language automatically are two completely different things, stored differently in the brain and developed through entirely different means. You cannot study your way to fluency. And yet English classes keep trying.

The result is learners who can explain the difference between the present perfect and the simple past, but freeze up the moment someone asks them a spontaneous question in English. The knowledge is there. The fluency is not. And the class, despite everyone’s best efforts, has not bridged that gap.

Surrounded by Poor English

Here is something that doesn’t get discussed enough about group English classes: the language environment inside them is not great.

Think about it. You are in a room, physical or virtual, full of people who are all learning English. Which means you are surrounded, for the duration of the class, primarily by non-native English speakers using imperfect English. The teacher speaks English, yes. But in a class of ten or fifteen students, the teacher’s voice is one among many, and a significant portion of the spoken English you hear in that room is coming from people who are making the same kinds of mistakes you are.

This is not anyone’s fault. It is just the inevitable reality of a group learning environment.

Now contrast that with an hour spent listening to a high-quality English podcast, or reading a beautifully written English article, or watching a documentary narrated by a clear and eloquent English speaker. In those environments, every single piece of English you encounter is natural, correct, and modelling exactly what you want to sound like.

The input quality in a traditional English class is, frankly, not very good. And input quality matters enormously.

The Schedule Problem

English classes happen on someone else’s timetable. Tuesday evenings at seven. Saturday mornings at ten. Whatever the school has decided works for most people, which may or may not work for you.

This means that your English learning is locked to a fixed point in the week. Miss the class, and you’ve lost that week’s progress. Can’t make it on Tuesday? Too bad, there’s no Tuesday next week. Go on holiday? The course keeps moving without you.

Compare this to input-based learning, which happens whenever you have your phone and your headphones. On the bus. While cooking. During a morning run. At whatever time of day your brain is freshest and most receptive. Learning that fits around your life rather than demanding that your life fit around it.

The flexibility gap between a traditional English class and a personal listening and reading habit is enormous. And for busy adults, that flexibility is not a luxury. It is often the difference between actually learning and not learning at all.

The Motivation Problem

Here is perhaps the most damaging thing about traditional English classes: they have a remarkable ability to make language learning feel like a chore.

Grammar exercises are not inherently engaging. Textbook dialogues about going to the post office are not particularly compelling. Being corrected in front of classmates is not a wonderful feeling. Sitting in a lesson that moves too slowly for you, or too quickly, because a class has to move at one pace for everyone, is frustrating in a very specific and demoralising way.

And when language learning stops feeling good, people stop doing it. They miss a class. Then another. Then they quietly abandon the course and tell themselves they’re just not a language person.

They are a language person. They just needed a better environment.

Stephen Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis is worth invoking here: anxiety, boredom, and a sense of failure actively block language acquisition. A classroom environment that regularly produces these feelings is not just failing to teach English. It is actively working against the conditions that make learning possible.

The Minimum Effective Dose Problem

Even the best English class, with the most engaging teacher and the most enthusiastic students, gives you a relatively small amount of English input per session.

An hour-long class, subtract the time spent on instructions, exercises, explanations, waiting for other students, and general classroom logistics, might give you twenty or thirty minutes of actual English exposure. Once a week, that is twenty to thirty minutes of meaningful input per week.

As we explored in our post about finding time to listen, a learner who uses their commute, their morning routine, and their household chores can easily accumulate fifteen or more hours of English listening per week without any dedicated study sessions at all.

Fifteen hours versus thirty minutes. That is the scale of the difference we are talking about. The class simply cannot compete on volume, and volume, as the research consistently shows, is one of the most important factors in language acquisition.

What About the Social Element?

To be fair, there is one thing that English classes offer that independent learning cannot easily replicate: human connection. The social aspect of a class, the sense of being in something together with other learners, can be genuinely motivating for some people.

And that’s real. Community matters. Accountability matters. Having other people who are on the same journey can help you keep going on the days when motivation is low.

But it’s worth asking whether an expensive weekly class is the most effective way to get that social element. Online language learning communities exist in abundance. Language exchange partners are available for free. And a good conversation tutor on a platform like iTalki gives you real human connection, in real English, on your schedule, with someone whose entire focus is you rather than a classroom of fifteen people.

The social element is valuable. The class, as the vehicle for delivering it, is not the only option.

So What Should You Do Instead?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you already know the answer. In fact, you’ve probably been waiting for it.

The solution is not complicated. It is just very different from what most people have been told language learning looks like.

Read a lot of English, every day, on things that genuinely interest you. Listen to a lot of English, every day, woven into the time that already exists in your life. Combine reading and listening together whenever you can for maximum depth and efficiency. Return to content you love so the language can bed in more deeply over time. Build English into your environment so it becomes a constant presence rather than a scheduled event.

Use LingQ to make your reading and listening as structured and trackable as possible, with vocabulary support in context and a running known words count that gives you a real measure of real progress. Sign up here: lingq.com

And when you’re ready to speak, find a skilled conversation partner who understands the input-based approach, who will give you a warm, low-pressure space to practise, who listens to what you’re actually saying rather than just how you’re saying it, and who will have a real conversation with you rather than drilling you on grammar.

That is it. That is the whole method. And it will take you further, faster, more enjoyably, and for a fraction of the cost of a traditional English class.

The Maths, Just For Fun

Let’s say you’re spending two hundred dollars a month on English classes. That’s two thousand four hundred dollars a year. For roughly four hours of classroom time per month, in a group setting, following a grammar curriculum, surrounded by other learners.

A LingQ subscription costs a fraction of that. A weekly iTalki conversation session with a tutor costs significantly less than a traditional class. And the rest of your learning, the podcasts, the reading, the YouTube, the audiobooks, is entirely free.

You get more input. Better input. On your schedule. On topics you actually care about. For dramatically less money.

It is, when you lay it out like that, a fairly easy decision.

Ready to Make the Switch?

If you’ve been spending time and money on English classes that haven’t been getting you where you want to go, the good news is that switching is simple. You don’t need to find a new school or enrol in a new course. You just need your phone, your headphones, and a genuine curiosity about English content that interests you.

Start reading. Start listening. Start today.

For building your English through content you love, with vocabulary tracking and simultaneous reading and listening, LingQ is the tool I recommend above all others: lingq.com

For learning English through real TV shows and films with interactive subtitles, Lingopie turns your screen time into genuine acquisition.

If you want compelling, story-driven English listening at just the right level, Olly Richards’ Conversations course is well worth exploring.

If you’re looking for a conversation partner to practise your English with, iTalki is where I’d start. It’s full of great tutors across every language and every style. And if you’d like to work with me specifically, no grammar drills, no textbook dialogues, just two people having a genuinely good conversation in English, book a trial lesson here.

Your English class had its chance. Time to try something that actually works.

✍🏼 Richard

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