Learning a Language Online: My Experience with Italki, an on-demand online Platform with live Language instructors for over 130 Languages
Learning a language online: my experience with Italki
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Company Overview
Italki is a platform where you can book language classes directly from a tutor.
It was founded in 2007 by Kevin Chen and Yongyue Jiang, focusing on building free features for the community.
In 2009, the site launched its teacher marketplace, allowing teachers to earn money by providing online tutoring services and since around 2012, raising angel funding from independent investors, skyrocketed to success.
Italki has been mentioned by authoritative sites such as Business Insider, Investopedia, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
You’ll find thousands of independent teachers offering classes. They set their own schedule, price, have unique qualifications and experiences, and come from all over the world.
Italki itself doesn’t offer any classes, unlike Lingoda (you can read my article here). It’s simply teachers using their platform to facilitate the classes.
You can book a private lesson or just a simple chat to practice.
With teachers, you get to see their qualifications and read reviews from other students before making a choice. They set their availability and price and it’s up to you to select a time slot that works for both of you.
Italki are not the ones responsible for the quality of the sessions you get. They merely facilitate the connection, scheduling and payments.
Teachers depend on good reviews so that means that providing you a quality lesson is super important to them.
Payment is made through italki and classes typically take place over Skype, but options such as WeChat, FaceTime, and others are often available.
Unlike other online language platform, they offer an amazing variety of languages.
Wide range of languages available
There’s no other place where you will find as many teachers or as many languages being taught, with a user interface that supports 19 languages.
There are more than 130 languages, including English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, German, Korean, Russian, Italian and Portuguese and even endangered languages such as Basque and Blackfoot.
The abundance of language teachers available opens up a lot of options and lets you be pickier than you otherwise might be able to.
If you’d prefer your teacher be from a certain country, be within a certain age range, be a native speaker, or have experience teaching certain age ranges – this becomes possible on italki. Even in a country like Italy for example, regional accent matters.
This huge number of teachers with varying schedules makes it possible to find your ideal teacher and to take classes online without spending a fortune.
Different types of teachers
There are two different types of teachers available – Professional Teachers and Community Tutors.
Professional Teachers have at least one of the following, verified by italki staff:
- Professional teaching experience in school, university or language institute
- University degree in education
- Teaching certificate
Typically, though not always, you’ll find that the professional teachers are more expensive and have more experience teaching. They’re more likely to have extra materials or prepare lessons specifically for the student. You’d get a high quality lesson, as the teacher is expected to guide the lesson more and adapt to your needs better, based on their experience. This obviously varies with the person you have the lesson with.
Community Tutors are either Native speakers (if you select it) or have an advanced level of the language they’re teaching.
This option is usually more affordable than the language lessons option, specifically because it’s less likely to follow a lesson format. But that doesn’t mean they can be excellent teachers.
Anyway, Community tutors would generally be a better idea if you’re more interested in casual conversation practice.
Another option are Language Partners (In the ‘Community’ tab).
This option is great if you can’t afford to be getting private lessons, but still want time with a native who is motivated to patiently listen to you and correct your mistakes. All you have to do in exchange is to teach them your native language and you’ll have to write a post stating that you’re looking for someone to connect.
The biggest downside to this option might be that this sections of the app is flooded with people looking for language partners.
Choosing a teacher
To pick a teacher, you simply have to click on their profile, where you can review their video introduction, qualifications, availability, and their rating.
By checking their info, you’ll get a grasp of whether their specialization will fit your needs at all or not.
Due to the sheer number of teachers available, it can be a bit overwhelming to choose one. Luckily Italki has a few features to make it easier for you to figure this out.
When searching for a teacher, the filters include:
- Teacher type (professional or tutor)
- Location
- Price
- Teacher’s language
- Skills
When you click through to look at a profile of a teacher, what you want to be looking at are the number of lessons completed, the schedule (to suit your own availability), the review stars (out of 5) and the price (obviously).
The number of completed lessons may not matter too much if it’s a brand new teacher.
The ideal thing is to try out several teachers from both categories and go with the one(s) you feel is helping you the most.
You’ll find that most teachers offer a 30-minute trial class, oftentimes for half the price or less than that of a regular lesson.
Since there’s less financial risk involved in a 30 minute trial, my recommendation would be to schedule trial lessons with several different teachers and then continue taking regular classes with one or two that best fit your learning preferences.
Teacher and tutor pricing
As previously mentioned, prices are independently set on Italki.
This means that any teacher or tutor signing up to offer their services can determine their own pricing, starting at just $4.
Since Italki encourages pricing competition, you can find some unbelievably inexpensive sessions, depending on where the speakers are in the world.
Booking and paying for lessons
Italki has a ‘credit currency’ system for payments.
That means that instead of paying directly for a lesson, you buy credits.
You can either pay for lessons with a specific teacher, or you can purchase italki credits. The credits carry the same value as USD and can be used to purchase classes with any italki teacher.
The drawback there is that if you don’t use the site for a while, you may end up a lot of credits sitting in your account not being used. On the other hand, this can be a good motivator.
Nonetheless, if you book an online or in person course at a school, you normally have to pay all lessons in advance and if you miss a class you don’t get reimbursed.
The great part about online learning is that you complete lessons on your own terms and according to your own schedule.
Credits are then taken out of your italki wallet and held in a form of escrow until lesson completion (or if there’s a missed lesson or dispute, released back to you).
When you find a teacher that you’d like to schedule a lesson with simply click on the “Book Now” button. Alternatively, you can contact the teacher and ask them any questions you may have before beginning.
Often you’ll find that teachers have a few different types of classes that they offer. These may have different prices or all be the same, though it can be Tricky to sync italki calendar to Apple or Google calendar.
Finally, you’ll need to select the time that you’d like the lesson to take place. This is easy to do because italki’s schedules show when the teacher is available according to your own time zone.
After selecting the time for your class, you’ll choose which platform you’ll use for your lessons and add your username.
To communicate with your teacher, you can use italki Classroom, which is italki’s own tool that works on most browsers, or Skype.
You can also leave a message for the teacher before taking a lesson. This could give them a better idea of your language level, what you’d like to focus on, or just some things you may be interested in talking about.
Another way to stay engaged is to get to know fellow language learners through the free discussion forum.
You can post anything: language partner requests, grammar and language help, and questions about cultural differences.
What are italki lessons like?
Like I said above, italki is not really responsible in any way for the quality of the lessons.
They facilitate scheduling and payments. That’s it.
The rest is between you and the native speaker you arrange to spend time with.
Final thoughts
Regardless of where you live or the language you’d like to learn, taking classes on italki can be extremely beneficial, especially if you don’t have money to spend on classes.
Italki is really good, mainly because you can instantly find a teacher who is suited to your needs and language goals, no matter what time zone you are in or what part of the world you are based.
It’s plainly a flexible app that is truly student-centered. Unfortunately, the price and the quality of the language tutor can vary depending on the filters that you will apply when searching for one.
Learning a language online: my experience with Italki
Wrapping Up
Positives
- Wide range of languages available
- Huge community of teachers and learners
- Extremely affordable lessons
- Convenient booking system
- Lessons from professional teachers and native speakers
- Cheap trial lessons to find the best tutor match
Negatives
- No instant lesson feature
- Tricky to sync italki calendar to Apple or Google calendar
- The quality of lessons varies between tutors
- Credits system can be too binding.
Learning a language online: my experience with Italki
The italki system follows my own philosophy, by focusing on human connections and speaking languages as the focus, even in modern times when people are often busy and overwhelmed but still keen to learn.
The italki platform is an opportunity to make personalised, relevant learning accessible to people when and where they need it.
The biggest differences between online and face to face learning have always been in the realm of fostering connection and collaboration between learners. In-person social interaction has a richness that might feel hard to replicate in the digital world.
This emphasis on human connection is what online language learning platform italki focuses on, while saving you money and time, since it can be accessed on your terms, any time and anywhere. Not constrained with a date,time and place.
That’s why if you’re looking for a flexible and good price-quality language course, I do recommend you give it a try!
And let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
If you are interested in learning a language online, you can take a look at these reviews
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