5 min freeTravelling
Fiona Reid
A hotel receptionist in Edinburgh
Runs rooms pitched at working fluency and confident fluency
British EnglishFace to face, across a table, from Edinburgh
Not yet rated(0)
From 6 min
A session of any length
First five minutes free
In Fiona’s words
Fiona runs the front desk of a small hotel off the Royal Mile.
She is warm, chatty, and very proud of her city, and a check-in with her comes with directions, a warning about the hill and three places you must not miss. She speaks with a soft Scottish accent that gets stronger when she is enthusiastic, which is often. Checking in is the easy part. Following her directions to the one pub she swears by, from memory, is the part people practise.
1min
They speak first, about a second after you press start. There is no press-to-talk and no waiting for your turn.
4min
Four minutes of the real thing, at the real pace, with the interruptions where a real one would put them.
1min
Your pace, your pauses and your filler words are counted within a second, and the score follows. Nobody asks for a card to hear it.
What a score from Fiona is worth
How the score is worked out here
Three things, and you can read what each one actually means. None of them turn this into an exam: talk to this person as often as you like, and the score is there only if you want it.
Run on Fiona
Cleared
Published criteria
The criteria and their weights are visible before you speak.
- Here
- Left at the lights, second right, past the church: spoken directions are the everyday test of listening that no app has replaced.
- Held by
- Published in advance; changes go through review
- Method
- Before you speak you can see what is being measured and how much each thing is worth, as percentages that add up to a hundred. That is checked automatically: a set whose percentages do not add up never reaches the site.
Situations and levels
What Fiona runs, and what a fortnight of it costs
A minute costs the same whoever you talk to: the expensive part is the model, not the person. Move the sliders to match the two weeks you actually have.
Situations
Difficulty
What it costs to rehearse this properly
Three runs across a week is what changes an answer. Move the sliders to your own plan. Nothing renews, and nothing is charged until you buy minutes.
- Minutes of talking in total
- 36
- What that costs here
- $16
- The same minutes with a tutor
- $300
- You do not spend
- −$284
At $50 an hour, rounded up to the 60-minute booking nobody will sell you less than.
Ratings
Nobody has rated Fiona yet
You cannot leave a rating here without finishing a conversation first. That is why there are none: the catalog has not been opened to anybody yet.
- One conversation, one rating
- A rating is tied to one conversation, and a conversation can only be used once. It cannot be attached to a conversation that never happened.
- Written by the person who spoke
- Not by somebody who bought a package. The stronger claim, and the only one this product is in a position to make.
- Read before it is published
- The same rule everything else a visitor reads goes through. Nothing appears here automatically.
Compared with an hour of a tutor
18 rehearsals with Fiona for the price of one lesson
A human tutor is worth $50 an hour. What they cannot do is sell you 6 minutes, be free the morning of the interview, or cut you off mid-sentence because that is what the room will do.
One lesson, 60 min
$50
One rehearsal, 6 min
$2.64
95% less, and you can do it 18 times before the hour is paid for.
| A human tutor | Reallang | |
|---|---|---|
| Shortest thing you can buy | 60 minutes | 6 minutes, or five |
| What that costs | $50 | $2.64 |
| When you can have it | When they are free | Now, or at 6am on the day |
| Feedback in writing | About 24 hours later | 60 seconds later |
| Will they interrupt you | No. They are being kind | Yes, on purpose, at ninety seconds |
| Evidence under the feedback | What they remember | Your own sentence, checked |
| Can they hear what you meant | Yes, and that is the point of them | No. It is a rehearsal, not a teacher |
The last row is not a concession, it is the division of labour. A tutor teaches you the language. This rehearses the minutes where you have to use it, and there is no reason to buy an hour of a person’s time to do that.
Start a session
Pick the meeting, and Fiona starts talking
There is no calendar, because there is nothing to wait for. Choose which conversation it is, allow the microphone, and a second later you are talking.
Which conversation are you having?
Fiona Reid runs 2 meetings. They are different conversations, not easy and hard versions of one, and each has its own criteria.
What counts as going well
Fix the booking problem and leave knowing breakfast time, the Wi-Fi and how the door works.
Fiona Reid
British English · warm
- Waiting
- 0.8 seconds
- The score
- 60 seconds after
- This one
- Free
- After that
- $2.20
- The first 5 minutes cost nothing and no card is asked for.
- We ask for your microphone before the conversation starts, never after.
- Audio is not stored. The written record of the conversation is, because the score quotes from it.
Also free the first time
Who to talk to after Fiona
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