To be completely honest, I got graded a "D" in French - the equivalent of a level three in today's UK school system. My great-aunt has a holiday home in the south of France, but every time I visit, we end up speaking English to one another (and I let her handle the spoken exchanges outside the home).

When Duolingo launched in 2012 as a language-learning app, I was quick to sign up - and I still use it to this day. In fact, last year (by accident) I signed up for an annual subscription to Super Duolingo, which cost around £55. Soon, on March 23, my subscription runs out, and it'll cost £68.99 to renew for the year, but there's a better tool out there.

For those who have used Duolingo, you might agree it's a great tool for learning vocabulary, especially for reading and writing.

Duolingo has really helped me read and write better French and Spanish. In my experience, learning Spanish is easier than learning French, but I still can't really get a conversation going.

In the beginning stages of Duolingo, be prepared to learn how to say: "I eat apples." It's not the best conversation starter, that's for sure.

And, to be fair, a year after using Super Duolingo (switching to Spanish), I'd be shocked if I could do more than point out objects to name what they are - a bit like a toddler who is learning to talk.

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A running joke is that my boyfriend and I pronounce many Spanish words completely differently, but Duolingo says we're both right - it was time to try something new.

After just one private Spanish session via the Preply app, I learnt how to pronounce the vowels correctly and some basic conversation skills, such as "¿cómo estuvo tu semana?", which means "how was your week?"

Setting up Preply is super easy. I just downloaded the app to my phone, and then I was presented with thousands of online tutors to choose from. For Spanish tutors, for example, the results showed 13,356 people to choose from, which can feel overwhelming.

This is when I delved into the filters to select a "Super Tutor", meaning to view "only highly-rated and reliable tutors", and I also selected "Professional Tutors" to see "highly-qualified tutors with verified teaching certificates" that also speak "English".

This whittled down the choice to 918 tutors, and if I selected "view only native speaker tutors of the language you're learning", the choice went down to 884 people.

That's still a lot of people to choose from, so after watching a few videos the tutors have posted (they all have a video), I picked Diana - and felt assured that if the lesson didn't go well, I could get a refund and try a different tutor.

While I used the app for scheduling my appointment with Diana, I didn't want to learn to talk through my small mobile screen, which is where the website comes in handy.

I was able to sign in to the website and start a video lesson with Diana, where she asked me about my learning goals and learning style (I'm a visual learner). The next 50 minutes whizzed by, and I was finally pronouncing Spanish words properly.

She taught me, for example, that you don't pronounce the letter "h" in Spanish, nor does the sound of "v" exist; so for vino (wine) it sounds like "bino".

And I'll be enjoying many of those on my upcoming trip to the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic, por favor.

I now have a subscription-based learning plan, where I get eight lessons with Diana for £189.81, but the price of tutors varies on Preply.