This commentary reconsiders the description and assessment of the design and implementation of German Tutor, an Intelligent Language Tutoring System (ILTS) for learners of German as a foreign language, published in 2001. Based on our experience over the past 15 years with the design and real classroom use of an ILTS, we address a number of technological and pedagogical issues as they relate to the approach and motivation of designing an ILTS. We also discuss some of the core limitations of

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... n Tutor that eventually resulted in E-Tutor, a modified and enhanced ILTS implemented in 2003 and further expanded in 2009. The commentary concludes with a description of the core contributions of German Tutor as a learnercentered ILTS. Since its initial implementation in 1998, German Tutor has been studied as a component of regular classroom instruction and this body of research has informed not only system upgrades and development but also studies of learner-computer interactions or, computer-assisted language learning (CALL), more generally.