Can the Fully Fluent app finally deliver on the promise of an AI tutor that truly feels like a real language teacher? My honest review.
Fully Fluent is an AI-powered language learning app that has been available in the app stores for roughly two years. It is marketed as a “personal AI language tutor” and supposed to improve users’ fluency by conversations, games, roleplaying and personal feedback. The app supports multiple major languages, including Mandarin Chinese, so I had to try it out.
Main features
This is what the Fully Fluent app has to offer for language learners. The first three are more or less standard and to be expected from any AI language tutor app:
AI-powered chat where you can either speak or write
Games for free-style language practice
Instant feedback on all the output you produce
But these two features go beyond what I’ve seen so far:
Editable learning history including covered vocabularies and previous conversations
Interactive lessons with an AI-tutor that cover specific topics
My experience with Fully Fluent
Let’s start by noting that Fully Fluent brings something genuinely new: its AI language tutor actually behaves like a real tutor. The app isn’t just another ChatGPT wrapper programmed to give you short answers and a follow-up question in your target language.
Structured lessons with a personal touch
Fully Fluent can remember the personal details you share – your trip to Iceland, your fascination with stray cats, your failed career as a smuggler (whatever it may be) – and build on them in future conversations. During lessons – chat sessions of about 15 minutes – the tutor refers back to those personal details and encourages you to create practice sentences around them.
What I like about these lessons is that they’re thematically connected, with a clear structure. They’re also interactive, and in that sense, they really do feel like a session with a real teacher. You have to put in effort, but the more you give, the more you get back. The 15-minute duration also feels perfect for a quick study session on your phone.
Study hall – the place to review what you’ve learned
The “study hall” feature is another smart innovation – something most similar apps lack. Other apps like Talkpal may give you transcripts or summaries of past conversations, but rarely at the word or sentence level. And honestly, who has the discipline (or excitement) to review entire chats?
Fully Fluent solves that by keeping a learning history that you can edit yourself. Words you already know or find irrelevant can be deleted immediately, while the vocabulary worth keeping can be practiced further through flashcards.
Mediocre design and mechanic AI-voices
That said, there’s still room for improvement. I’m not particularly impressed with the design, which looks pretty generic and unremarkable – though that’s a minor issue. What bothers me more are the AI voices: they don’t sound unnatural, but they sometimes switch oddly between male and female tones, or between heavier and lighter voices. Just when you start to believe your AI tutor feels almost real, a mechanical pitch shift reminds you it’s not. A pity, really.
My frustrations with speaking mode
I also didn’t find the speaking mode to be a big success yet. Which is a shame, because it’s actually the most fun and challenging way to practice your Chinese – when it works. To be fair, part of the blame might lie with me, since my pronunciation isn’t always perfect. But you quickly run into situations where a human tutor would understand you without any problem, while the AI tutor completely misinterprets what you said. The first time, it’s kind of funny; after a few repeats, it just gets frustrating – and potentially discouraging. You don’t want to start doubting your pronunciation unnecessarily.
Beyond pronunciation issues, even slightly hesitant sentences – when you pause to find the right structure or repeat a word – can throw the system off. After all, the app mainly converts your speech to text, and that transcription isn’t always accurate. The result? You end up being marked wrong for mistakes you didn’t actually make. Bad for confidence, bad for motivation.
Translation errors and incorrect grammar advise
When setting up the app, I selected Dutch, as shown in the screenshots. I couldn’t change it. It strongly appears the interface was automatically translated from English without context. Some translations are fine, but others are completely off. The whole thing seems sloppy to me. I understand that you can quickly “scale” a product this way, but you really shouldn’t unleash a product like this on a paying customer.
But what’s even worse is the AI tutor getting basic stuff wrong. I’m aware of the usual disclaimers “AI can make errors”, but as a learner I want to completely trust my tutor and everything he / she says. In this particular case, I was corrected for not using the connector 和 (and) between two verbs like you would do in English (I boiled water and made tea – two actions that follow each other). In Chinese – or so I was taught – you don’t need a connector to combine verbs this way. I at least haven’t heard or seen it and find it highly unusual for AI to make this kind of basic level grammar mistakes. Even though this is just one example and I didn’t come across others, I find it concerning. This little experience unfortunately greatly reduces my trust in the capabilities of the Fully Fluent AI tutor for Chinese.
Likes
Does actually act like a proper tutor, explains vocab and grammar, corrects mistakes
Structured & interactive lessons
Remembers previous input you gave which makes engaging with the AI-tutor more personal
Tracks studied words in “Study Hall”, supports flashcard-like practice and AI-chat vocabulary training for studied words
Cost-efficient option compared to real tutors
Audio sounds natural, speed can be adjusted, various voices available
The developer states that “no data shared with third parties” and that data is encrypted in transit
Dislikes
No freemium model: can’t start practising without paying
The AI tutor isn’t always right (about Chinese grammar), correct things that are fine in spoken Chinese
Translation errors in Dutch version (and other non-English versions?)
Speaking mode: low error tolerance for voice recognition, seems to prefer standard pronunciation and correct tones. Produces lots of misunderstandings.
AI-voices sound occasionally robotic, shift between female and male voice
Some minor bugs
Fully Fluent app suitable for beginning learners of Chinese?
I’ve mentioned it in other reviews: in my opinion, the average AI tutor app only becomes interesting after you reached an intermediate level, say, somewhere around HSK4, where you can read and write simple sentences without much difficulty.
Fully Fluent allows you to adjust the difficulty level in your profile. I tried the beginner lessons myself, and our tutor, Fify, practiced ni hao and other greetings with me – in English. The hilarious thing was: as soon as I responded in Chinese instead of pinyin and wrote a little more than expected, Fify switched completely to Chinese and fired complex sentences at me.
And that’s precisely my point: for a beginner, “less is more” – too much complexity equals frustration. Of course, you could explain and practice ni hao in Chinese to a complete beginner, but with very few words and a lot of patience. And not like Fify, which immediately shifts from first to fourth gear.
Which language skills can you train with the app?
The Fully Fluent app covers all four language skills, so speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The emphasis seems to be on speaking (it is called “Fully Fluent,” after all), but be prepared for the misunderstandings if your pronunciation isn’t spot-on. Fortunately, you can always switch to writing instead. And if you’re on a crowded train, typing and reading are definitely the more practical options. In the end, the choice is yours.
Fully Fluent vs Talkpal
Fully Fluent remembers conversations, just like a real tutor would. So if you mention that you had car problems yesterday, it will remember. Just like it is able to refer to earlier example sentences and other input you gave during previous lessons. This makes interacting with the app more personal and meaningful.
That’s not the case with Talkpal. Here, you can share all your joys and sorrows in a conversation, but the next time you open the chat, chatbot “Emma” has forgotten everything. Sure, you can continue an earlier conversation, but Talkpal has the memory of a goldfish – whereas with Fully Fluent, you’ll be amazed again and again by how much your tutor remembers about you, misconceptions included.
Aside from this difference, I do think Talkpal has more to offer in terms of the variety of exercises. So even though tutor Emma is inferior, the app does provide more diversity. I also find the design more appealing – though that’s open to debate.
Fully Fluent vs Tutor Lilly
With Tutor Lilly (who came up with that name?), I was pleasantly surprised by Lilly’s “developed personality,” which made it possible to have a more “human” conversation, for example, by exchanging favorite movies.
Unfortunately, Fully Fluent’s Fify can’t match that. When you ask her for her favorite movie or book, she answers very dryly that she doesn’t watch movies or read books as a language learning partner. She can, however, recommend movies (which she hasn’t seen herself^^). So, if you’re looking for signs of an actual personality in a conversation with the AI chatbot, you’ll probably be disappointed by Fully Fluent. On the other hand, Fify remembers personal details from previous conversations better, which makes the conversation more personal and relevant – as I mentioned before.
Furthermore, unlike Lilly, Fully Fluent offers interactive lessons and a dashboard to keep track of studied vocabulary and grammar. The other features are fairly similar, apart from speaking with historical characters – Fully Fluent doesn’t have that.
What others users have to say about Fully Fluent
On Google Play the AI language tutor app has over 1 million downloads and tens of thousands of reviews. Most users generally like Fully Fluent for its conversational practice, flexible chat modes, and confidence-boosting AI tutor. The interface is seen as engaging, with role-plays and audio/text options that help practice speaking without judgement. Popular languages like English, Spanish, and French get good feedback. I haven’t read much about Chinese.
On the downside, many complain about restrictive free use (only a few sentences before hitting limits), pricey subscriptions, and ads (I didn’t see any). Some feel misled about free trials or charges. Technical issues include bugs, freezing, poor microphone recognition, and robotic or inaccurate AI voices. Content breadth is still limited, with missing languages and inconsistent conversation memory.
Overall, ratings average around 4.5/5 on Android, but reviews are mixed: strong praise for the idea and confidence-building, frustration with paywalls, stability, and feature gaps. So yes, the app is promising but still young.
Pricing
Fully Fluent is free to download, but there’s – which is quite unique – practically no free trial. If you want to check out the app for one month, it will cost around US$14.99/month depending on your region. A yearly subscription costs about US$79.99. Compared to other AI language tutor apps, I find the app somewhat expensive.
Conclusion – great potential, but not there yet
When I weigh up all the pros and cons, I find the price for this app rather bold. To sum it up, I see a lot of potential, but there are still quite a few rough edges. From robotic AI voices and sloppy translations to mediocre design and outright incorrect grammar lessons – there’s plenty of room for improvement. I trust these issues will be addressed, but in the meantime, I won’t be renewing my subscription.
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