What does FluentDojo cost, and how much is free?
The free tier costs ¥0 and needs no payment details: 3 real-time voice sessions per day and 20 per month, with the quota resetting every 24 hours. Membership is ¥29/month or ¥229/year — the annual plan works out at about ¥19.1 per month, 34% less than paying monthly for 12 months — and raises the quota to 15 sessions per day and 200 per month.
One "session" here means one complete real-time voice conversation, not one sentence; the listening, reading, writing and read-aloud drills do not draw on that quota. Payment is collected by Stripe and accepts international Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards; Alipay and WeChat Pay are not supported yet. First-time subscribers can request a full refund by email within 14 days, and auto-renewal can be cancelled at any time — access then runs to the end of the paid period.
Is there real research behind shadowing, and how long should a session be?
Yes, with limits. The 2025 systematic review by Whitworth & Rose (open access via the Oxford University Research Archive, 44 studies after screening) concludes that shadowing training improves comprehensibility, intelligibility and suprasegmental control such as fluency and prosody, while the evidence on segmental accuracy is inconclusive.
Across the studies reviewed, a typical dose is roughly 10 minutes per session, 4 days a week, sustained for 8 weeks — that is how the experiments were designed, not a promise of a result. The review also names its own methodological problems: an over-reliance on controlled speaking tasks, and a missing link between acoustic measurements and how real listeners actually judge the speaker. "The instrument says you improved" and "people understand you better" are not yet the same claim. The paper is linked in the sources below.
How do I tell what level my English actually is?
Use the CEFR rather than a vocabulary count. The Council of Europe published the CEFR in 2001 and its Companion Volume in 2020; it splits proficiency into six levels — A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 — described by what a learner can do, not by a score.
Exam scales map separately. IELTS has used a 1–9 band scale since 1989 and rates speaking on fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation; TOEFL iBT speaking is scored 0–30. Both publish their own CEFR alignment, and it does not run backwards — a band is not a level. FluentDojo's interface ships in 2 languages (Simplified Chinese and English); it is a practice tool, issues no certification of its own, and is not a mock exam with official past papers.
Which way of practising speaking should I pick?
The difference is not which is "best" — it is whether you get immediate feedback, and how the cost is structured:
| Approach | Immediate feedback | Cost structure | Best suited to |
|---|
| FluentDojo real-time voice practice | A scored debrief after each call (fluency, grammar, vocabulary) with rewrites; pronunciation scores in read-aloud practice | From ¥0; membership ¥29/month or ¥229/year | Not daring to speak; too little practice volume |
| One-to-one human tutor | Yes — quality depends on the tutor | Billed per lesson, typically far above a subscription | Existing base; targeted correction |
| Shadowing alone, unassisted | None — not hearing your own errors is its main weakness | ¥0 | A supplement for rhythm and prosody |
| General-purpose voice assistant | No scoring, no pronunciation correction | Varies by product | Finding topics; increasing input |
Prices and quotas follow whatever the pricing page currently publishes; the figures here were reconciled on 27 August 2026. FluentDojo is a practice tool and guarantees no fluency, accent or exam outcome.
Where can the claims on this page be checked?
Primary sources only — official exam boards, the framework's own publisher, and peer-reviewed research. Each link was verified reachable on 27 August 2026.
