Two Things AI Can't Replace in Language Learning

A couple of weeks ago I was at an AI event in Brussels - a panel about Europe’s place in the AI race, the usual mix of consultants and engineers.

During the networking, one of them asked me the question I get constantly now: “Aren’t you scared? For your job, I mean.” Everybody expects AI to kick teachers out of the job market.

I wasn’t being polite when I said no.

I use AI every single day in my own community - my students are supposed to pre-correct their journal entries before posting them and I give a second check.

I’m not precious about the tech. But I’ve never been worried about AI replacing me, because somewhere along the way I noticed there are exactly two things it has never once been able to give my students.

Everything else - the grammar, the vocabulary drilling, the correction - AI already does pretty fine, but I don’t think this is my added value as a professional.

AI can chat with you in French all day. It will never once ask “no but really, how are you” and mean it (unless maybe you dump all your life). It has no real full memory of your bad week, that you’re stressed about a thesis, nothing to say back except more language… at least yet.

Here’s the pushback I always get: but AI doesn’t judge you — that’s exactly why people use it for the hard stuff. And that’s true, but I think it’s answering a different question than the one I’m asking.

I think that people use for therapy not only to save money, but also because it can function as a pre-processing space - somewhere to work through something before you’re ready to say it to an actual person.

That’s not nothing.

But pre-processing isn’t the same as being known. At some point, the thing that actually moves you - the motivation to keep showing up, to keep speaking a language you’re bad at in front of someone - comes from a relationship with stakes in it, not a judgment-free void.

AI can be the waiting room. It can’t be the person who’s glad to see you.

I believe that intrinsic motivation is the single biggest factor in whether someone actually learns a language - not the app or the method. And for a huge number of adult learners, especially the ones who’ve quit classes before finding me, that motivation has to come from a person, at least at first.

When this shows up: One of my older students was going through a brutal stretch - finishing her thesis, not much to talk about some days. So I started just telling her about my own life instead - the events I go to, the struggles of actually building a network as an immigrant here, whatever I’d been thinking about that week. I’d talk, she’d flag the words she didn’t know, we’d work through them together.

At some point I felt guilty about it - I was the one talking most of the time, barely letting her get a word in. So I asked her, “Is there anything I can do for you? Any topic you’d rather talk about?” She was deep in thesis mode, trying to get free of university more than anything else.

Her answer: “I don’t mind listening. Your life is really interesting. I hope I have something like that someday.”

I’d never once thought my life could be something someone aspired to. AI cannot do that for a person. It has no life to offer them.

This is the another one that people miss. AI can give you pros and cons. It can role-play a job interview. What it often can’t do (unless maybe you’re particularly good at prompting and you give the real full picture) is actually be someone with something on the line who helps you make a real decision - and then find out, in real time, how it turned out.

When this shows up, exactly: That same student came to me stuck on her master’s thesis topic. I told her - if she wanted to stay in Italy with her Italian boyfriend, who had zero plans to leave, she needed a thesis that gave her something useful there, not just something interesting.

We worked through two ideas her professor gave her and picked one (I’ve been knowing this girl since 2021, I still remember the day I taught her the articles in Italian and now she speaks with almost no foreign accent and rather the local accent of where she lives).

Months later she went to a job fair. A construction company took one look at her thesis topic and wrote her name down on a separate sheet - the only name they noted all day.

She texted me straight from the fair to tell me. That’s not a conversation you can simulate. That’s a relationship with real consequences, playing out in real time, on WhatsApp, between two people who actually know each other.

If I’m honest, what I actually want with my students is closer to friendship than to teaching. I crave that. I want to be the person you text between classes, the buddy you check in with, the daily companion on WhatsApp - not someone confined to a 50-minute slot once a week.

Lots of foreigners dream about a buddy at work. I don’t see why language learning should be any different. I found out the importance of “humanness” about myself before I ever found it out about my students.

I once tried journaling in an accountability group of mostly Russian speakers - writing in Russian, completely uncensored, genuinely intimate stuff. AI handled all my corrections the whole time, so that part never changed.

What made it work was knowing that the people in that group could actually read what I wrote and understand it.

Then I tried the same thing, same group, but in languages they couldn’t read. My motivation collapsed almost immediately - even though the AI correction was identical both times. It turns out correction was never the variable. Being understood by someone was.

So here’s the one concrete thing to take from this, if you’re trying to build any kind of accountability into your own learning: don’t settle for a group or a tracker that only sees that you showed up. Find people who can actually understand what you’re saying - because being tracked isn’t the same as being understood, and for lots of people, only one of those actually keeps you coming back.

I know there are people reading this thinking “not me - I’m disciplined enough to just grind through it alone.” Fair enough, and if that’s genuinely you, you probably don’t need this post. But I’d gently push back on how rare that actually is.

Most of the students who come to me have already tried the solo, disciplined route - an app, a tracker, a private notebook - and quietly stopped, because a tracker doesn’t notice when you vanish for two weeks, and a habit streak doesn’t sincerely ask you why. If the solo version has genuinely worked for you long-term, you’re probably the exception, not the rule - and this post was never really written for you.

That need doesn’t disappear once you’ve found the right person or group, either. A while ago I went to another AI conference - I go to a lot of them, it’s a genuine interest of mine - and posted in my community about some of the experiments and use cases I’d seen.

One of my students messaged me afterward: that post gave her the push to go look into something she was curious about but had never encountered at university. Not a lesson. Not a prompt. Just me, being interested in something, out loud, where she could see it - and her, actually being seen reaching back.

That’s the actual product I offer. Not merely corrections, not a pure accountability infrastructure - a real person you get to know, who happens to also help you learn a language. When that clicks, it gets sort of addictive, honestly, in the best way.

If you want to know what that actually feels like from the inside - that’s what the Frequency Circle is.