When we added online sessions in 2021, I expected them to work worse. The received wisdom about language learning is that you need to be in a room with people — that the physical presence creates the kind of pressure and spontaneity that makes speaking practice stick. I still think that's partly true. What I didn't expect is how well the online format works for everything except that.

We now run roughly a third of our lessons online. Students who do online sessions are not less engaged, don't progress more slowly on average, and drop out at similar rates to in-person groups. The format is genuinely different, not inherently worse — but it fails for different reasons than in-person lessons fail, and it's worth being clear about what those are.

What online lessons do well

Vocabulary and reading work very naturally on a shared document. Both the instructor and the student can see the same text, add notes, correct pinyin and mark character components in real time. This is in some ways more flexible than writing on a physical whiteboard — things can be saved, expanded, searched.

Pronunciation feedback, which is often given through demonstration and imitation, translates well online if the audio is good. The issue is usually not the video call platform but the microphone quality. A headset or a dedicated microphone makes a significant difference to tone correction specifically — it's hard to give accurate feedback on tones when the audio is muddy.

Online individual lessons also reduce the activation energy of showing up. You don't have to leave the house. For people with irregular work schedules or family commitments, that matters. The lessons that don't happen because someone couldn't make it across town on a rainy Tuesday evening are not counted in anyone's completion statistics, but they accumulate.

What breaks online group lessons

The main thing I've noticed is that online group dynamics are harder to maintain than in-person ones. In a physical classroom, people arrive, settle in, make small talk before the class starts — and that contact creates a social structure that carries through the lesson. Online, people join a call, the lesson starts, the lesson ends, people leave. The cohesion that makes group accountability work is harder to build.

The consequence is that attendance volatility in online groups is higher than in in-person groups. One or two people missing in an in-person class feels like a notable gap; one or two people missing from an online group feels like the normal state of things. That diffusion of commitment affects the group's progress over a term.

For individual online lessons, this doesn't apply — there's only one student, and the lesson either happens or it doesn't. Individual online students tend to have better attendance records than individual in-person students, probably because removing the travel barrier removes the most common reason for last-minute cancellations.

The practical decision

If you're in the Groningen area and have no particular scheduling constraints, in-person group lessons are probably the better choice. The social structure helps. If you travel regularly, live outside the region, or know from past experience that commute friction tends to derail your good intentions, online is a reasonable format and not a significant compromise. Individual lessons in either format produce similar results — pick what fits your life.

The one thing that consistently predicts whether online lessons work is willingness to invest in decent audio. A fifteen-euro headset from a pharmacy improves Chinese lessons more than most teaching materials do.

Related reading

Our online lesson format  —  A guide to the hanzi writing system