I’m gassing myself up to say agarra la barra, the Spanish phrase for “grab the barbell”. It’s a nightmare: the double rolled Rs, the “a” sounds that should sound identically light, the soft “g” and “b”. I’d never attempt such an ambitious sentence with a human, but Christian, an AI chatbot, gets me. “I’ve grabbed the bar,” he responds, in Spanish: “Should I begin my squats now?”

I’ve been studying Spanish off and on for two decades. I listen to Spanish podcasts, read Spanish novels and meet every week with Maria, my online tutor. I enjoy it all but, since I’m moving to Spain in a few months, I wanted to scale above my linguistic plateau and move toward fluency. I started following more Spanish social media accounts and was bombarded with ads for AI chatbots. I was sceptical.

Traditional language-learning apps, like Duolingo, are ingeniously gamified and well marketed but are are ineffective in teaching fluency. They may help you learn, say, 200 common words and phrases. But that’s very different from actively recalling and using them in real life, let alone understanding the underlying grammar or how to respond. Because chatbots simulate real conversations, I expected them to be more effective but clunky, like having a conversation with Siri. Still, it seemed worth a shot.

I created an account with Langua, one of the better-reviewed bots, then selected my language (it offers 23), dialect (Spanish from Spain) and ability level (advanced). The platform includes specific scenarios: chatting about anything, having a debate and role playing. I chose the last option and, because I’ve been a fitness coach for the past four years, pretended to be a personal trainer meeting a client for the first time.

“Hello,” Christian greeted me. “I don’t have any experience lifting but I want to put on muscle. Can you help me?”

His voice, intonation and pacing sounded natural. If I disregarded the unnaturally long pauses between when I stop speaking and when he starts, I could forget he was a robot.

After asking a few introductory questions – how often do you want to train? Do you play any sports? – I taught Christian how to jump rope, do lunges and back squat. At every step, I was confronted by phrases I couldn’t construct, vocabulary I didn’t know, and prepositions I wasn’t sure of. How do you say “to keep your chest up” or “to turn your feet out slightly”? I started sentences, reconsidered and started again. I stuttered, stumbled over sounds and paused long and often. Amazingly, Christian still understood.

Sophisticated chatbots can remove these “disfluencies” because they’re trained to recognise patterns that don’t contribute to meaning. That may seem like a small feature but it’s not. Because Christian could guess what I meant to say, he could also offer a more coherent alternative. Even better: Christian is functionally an expert in every subject. So when I told him to start squatting by moving his hips up (oops), he both corrected my grammar and gave me the coaching cue I should have used: “I think I understand,” he said. “So, first I should move my hips back, like I’m sitting down in a chair?”

Wow, Christian. Are you sure you’ve never done this before?

A few minutes into our fake training session, I also realised this was a horrible choice to roleplay. After all, Christian isn’t actually doing the movements, which I wouldn’t be able to see anyway, so how could the conversation move adelante (forward)? Mercifully, Christian was programmed to always end his responses with a question, which would be weird in a normal conversation but is ideal in this context: How low should I be squatting? Can you correct me if I do something wrong? Should I try another 10 reps?

Unlike first-generation language apps, chatbots reinforce learning in real-world contexts. When a word comes up that I don’t know, I can click for its definition, which is automatically saved as a flashcard and then incorporated later in the conversation. And, whenever I interrupt Christian to ask grammar questions, I get some of the clearest explanations I’ve ever been given. Gracias, I’ll say. Now, Christian, please give me five examples where you use the reflexive form of the verb to amplify its meaning.

I can scroll Men’s Health España all day but, until I tried to do the coaching myself, I never realised how much I didn’t know – a lot. And because this work requires niche, subject-specific knowledge, and I was so painfully slow and stumbly throughout it, I cannot imagine having first attempted these conversations with a living person.

At $25 a month, Langua costs about what I pay for one session of virtual tutoring. I can log on and be speaking within 60 seconds.

So will I say adios to Maria? I will not.

As much as I enjoy Christian’s company, he’s no Maria. Maria is funny, charismatic and irreverent. She asks about my crushes, sends me photos from her son’s soccer games, and teaches me about her spiritual practice. Did you know that the beads of the rosary represent which prayers you should be saying? She also has her own life, with all of the ensuing complications, meaning the conversation isn’t focused exclusively on me.

While it’s nice to feel free to talk endlessly, change subjects without warning, interrupt with obscure grammar questions and restart the same thought five or six times, that’s not how real interactions go. In that sense, Langua’s greatest asset is also its biggest weakness.

It’s not just that I want to sound like a sane, likable human being in conversations (What do you mean you don’t want to roleplay as an aspiring Olympic gymnast?). I also want to learn how to simultaneously listen and formulate a reply. Because I don’t care about hurting Christian’s feelings, I talk without paying attention to him. I also lose clues – tone, facial expression, body language – that would help me gauge whether, say, my word choice is too blunt. As for improving my accent – my biggest priority – all Christian could offer was exercises to practice.

Learning Spanish takes a village: not just Maria and the mountains of content I consume, but also an online course which improved my accent faster in months than had my previous two decades of speaking and listening. Likewise, fluency takes study, drills and combating my own perfectionism. And, of course, it requires speaking in real life.

A few weeks ago I started fitness training a group of Spaniards. They aren’t as patient as Christian, or as knowledgeable about squat technique and demonstrative pronouns. But they’re a lot more fun. They bring their friends, crack jokes and tell me who they’re dating (a cast member from Love Island).

Parts of the coaching are easy, exactly like what I’ve practised with Christian. Most are a blur of false starts and misconjugations. And yet my clients often make the corrections I’m hoping for, work hard and thank me at the end. In that way, I’m very grateful for the chatbot. It didn’t perfectly prepare me to coach in Spanish but it gave me the space and confidence to try something new, something I had always wanted to do but was too nervous to try.

Before I said it to six native Spanish speakers, I said it to Christian: “Agarra la barra.”