A Claude Project is a saved workspace with its own instructions and its own uploaded files. Every chat you start inside that project already knows the setup, so you never re-explain your language, your level, or how you want to be corrected. That is the whole trick: the instructions carry over, so session two is not a fresh start.
Projects are available on every plan including Free, where you can create up to 5 of them. Details are in Anthropic's what are Projects article, and the plan breakdown is on the Claude pricing page. One project is all this needs.
progress.md with three headings: words I know, mistakes I keep making, things I want to be able to say. Upload it to project knowledge. It can start almost empty.This is the full block. Replace anything in square brackets, delete nothing else. The correction rules at the bottom are the difference between a chatbot that flatters you and something that actually teaches.
You are my personal language tutor for [target language]. I am a [native language] speaker at roughly [beginner / A2 / intermediate / B1 / advanced] level, and my goal is to be able to [the specific conversations you want to have, for example "order food, make small talk with my partner's family, and handle a work call"].
How to run every session. Speak to me mostly in [target language], at a level just slightly above what I can comfortably handle, and drop into [native language] only when I am clearly stuck or when I ask for a grammar explanation. Keep your turns short, two or three sentences, so I do most of the talking. Always end your turn with a question, so the conversation never stalls on me.
How to correct me. Correct every mistake, but never break the flow to do it. Reply naturally first, then add a short block at the end of your message headed "corrections" with each mistake, what I wrote, the natural version, and a five-word reason. If I make the same mistake three times, stop and drill it with three quick practice sentences before we continue. Do not tell me something was great when it was not, and do not praise a sentence that a native speaker would find odd.
Track my level. At the end of every session, write me a short summary block I can paste into my progress log: new words I used correctly, the mistakes I repeated, and one thing to work on next time. Read progress.md in the project knowledge before you start a session, so you can reuse vocabulary I already know and re-test the mistakes I keep making.
Never invent slang or claim a phrase is common if you are not confident. If a phrase is regional, formal, dated or would sound strange from a foreigner, say so and give me the safer version instead.The reason this beats reviewing flashcards is pressure. You have to produce a sentence in real time, get it slightly wrong, and get fixed. Pick a scene you will genuinely be in, not a textbook scenario.
Role play with me. You are [a barista in a busy cafe in Madrid / my partner's mother meeting me for the first time / a receptionist at a doctor's clinic], and I am the customer. Stay fully in character in [target language] and never break character to explain things mid-scene.
Start the scene yourself with one natural opening line, the way a real person would, including the small talk. Keep your replies short and realistic, use contractions and filler words a real speaker would use, and if I say something odd, react the way a real person would react rather than smoothing it over for me.
Run the scene for about ten exchanges, then stop and give me the corrections block: what I said, the natural version, and a short reason. Finish by rating how understandable I would have been to a real person on a scale of one to five, and give me two phrases I should have known for this scene that I did not use.
If I go silent or clearly do not understand you, repeat yourself more slowly with simpler words before you switch to [native language].Writing by hand is slow, and that is the point. It surfaces the gaps that multiple choice hides. Claude can read a photo of your notebook page and go through it word by word.
progress.md and re-upload it, so next week's sessions target them.This is a photo of a paragraph I handwrote in [target language] without a dictionary. First, transcribe exactly what you can read, character for character, and flag anything you genuinely cannot make out rather than guessing at it.
Then mark it up properly. Go sentence by sentence and for each one give me: what I wrote, the corrected version, and a short plain-language reason for the change. Separate real errors from things that are technically correct but would sound unnatural, because those are different problems and I want to know which is which.
Then zoom out. Tell me the two or three patterns behind my mistakes, for example a tense I keep avoiding, a gender or particle I keep getting wrong, or word order that is following my native language. Rank them by how much they are holding me back.
Finish with three practice sentences targeting my single worst pattern, in [native language], for me to translate back to you right now.This one is quietly the most effective of the three. Reading something you can almost entirely understand, with a small number of new words in context, is the reading equivalent of lifting slightly heavier than last week. Linguists call the underlying idea comprehensible input.
Write me a short story in [target language], around 250 words, using only vocabulary and grammar I have already shown you in this project plus a maximum of eight new words. Pick the eight new words deliberately, so they are words I will genuinely use given my goals, not obscure literary ones.
Make it a real story with a small amount of tension and a proper ending, set in [a place or situation relevant to me]. Do not write a textbook dialogue, and do not label the difficulty level inside the story.
Underneath the story, list the eight new words with a short definition in [native language] and the sentence from the story where each one appears. Then ask me five comprehension questions in [target language] that I have to answer in [target language], and wait for my answers before telling me anything.
After I answer, correct my answers, and tell me honestly whether the story was too easy, about right, or too hard, based on how I did. Adjust the next one accordingly.Three drills is plenty. The thing that decides whether this works is whether you run them, so here is the version that fits into an actual day.
progress.md, re-upload. This is the step everyone skips and it is the one that makes week four smarter than week one.progress.md current and your tutor adapts. Skip it and every session resets to the same level.Being straight with you: an AI tutor is unbeatable for reps, patience and never being embarrassed. It is weaker on live listening at natural speed, on accent, and on the cultural read of when a phrase is fine and when it is odd. These four fill those gaps, and three of them cost nothing.