Italki

[chinesemadrush]

Hi everyone,

 

Has anyone used their platform for learning Mandarin before? Am thinking of signing up for some of their courses and would like to gather some feedback.

 

Thank you!

[li3wei1]

I've used italki, and I'm on there as a teacher. For most of the main languages, there are plenty of teachers to choose from, and some are good and some less good. Try a few, and fine some that you like. If they have taught many classes, and have a lot of repeat customers, that's usually a good sign. There are also tons of Chinese people on there looking for language exchange partners, so if you would rather spend an hour speaking English than paying someone, you can do that, too.

[歪果仁]

Hello Chinese Madrush

I have been using Italki for a few months for HSK preparation. I think it is a great resource and while it does require spending my hard earned money at $12.5 per hour (we always go over so it is a really good deal) it does have a lot of advantages.

1. Traditional language exchange is complicated. Matching wants interests, schedules and abilities of two people across the world is really hard. While there is no shortage of Chinese people keen to practice with you if your Chinese is not at a certain level you end up getting in situations with people that just 99 percent speak English to you and that will not help you improve. I recommend waiting until intermediate stage to start language exchange.i don't blame the Chinese at all it is huge ask for a

2. You can have professional teacher. Teaching is a profession that takes experience and skill not everyone has the ability to teach language. I can speak English but I can't teach it. My Italki teacher is the an experienced teacher with qualifications and course materials so it is really a bargain

3. It works around your schedule and is flexible. You can arrange things to suit you.

The major downside is that the money does add up but I think other people spend a few grand a year on their hobbies so why not... it was certainly cheaper than face to face one on one classes in Sydney that start at $25 per hour but average at $45

So i would definitely try it out just sign up for a free trail lesson and go from there. The levels range from beginners to advanced so depending on your level.

Just my opinion.

[歪果仁]

My first post and I screwed it up with typos e.g trail instead of trial and I did not finish my thought, I was going to say don't blame the Chinese Language partners they want to make friends or talk about politics so it is more sorted to the advanced learner that can do this in Chinese and English. If that is you please disregard that advice

[chinesemadrush]

thanks alot for the feedback.

 

歪果仁, do you know of any business mandarin language tutors to recommend?

[歪果仁]

Hey Chinese Mad rush, I don't know my teacher is Merry Song she might be able to do it. However there are ones that say they specialise in Business Mandarin so maybe check them out first... sorry could not help more

[baihua]

Small world, Merry Song was my tutor when I was doing the HSK 5 exam. She always bent over backwards to help me and would abide by any time of my choosing, even when it was the early hours of the morning for her. A more patient a teacher you will not find, believe me.

 

chinesemadrush, Italki is a good platform, but if you're writing compositions, you need to head over to lang-8.

[歪果仁]

Yeah Merry is lovely very accomodating and polite. I would also highly recommend her!

I improved so much since I started having lessons with her I am not disciplined or structured enough to learn completely by myself.

[Flickserve]

Hi everyone,

Has anyone used their platform for learning Mandarin before? Am thinking of signing up for some of their courses and would like to gather some feedback.

Thank you!

I think it is OK to try. Some schools have their own prescribed courses and accreditation. That suits some types of people. Italki is a platform to introduce you to individual tutors who have their own style. That suits a different type of person.

I have tried both types in trying to refine my personal learning style.

[studychinese]

Good for low cost tutoring and practice. It helped me a lot.

[AdamD]

On @歪果仁's advice here, I used italki for the first time this morning, just to pay a community tutor to let me speak only Chinese for half an hour. It was tough overcoming my hatred of video calling, but it went extremely well and I will definitely do it again. Probably tomorrow. Twice.

[studychinese]

I did 20 hours on italki over 1 week, just practicing conversation with community tutors. After the 20 hours noticed a concrete improvement. 

 

I go to China twice or three times a year. While I am in China I manage to speak Chinese 100% of the time, but back home in Australia it was much more difficult. On occasion I would have an opportunity to meet a Chinese person, but it was difficult to get them to speak in Chinese because their English was much better than my Chinese. That is understandable. Italki allowed me to get to the conversational stage where the language ability of the Chinese people I meet in Australia is not necessarily greater than mine. More often than not these days the Chinese people that I meet in Australia no longer try to speak to me in English.

[AdamD]

5 minutes ago, studychinese said:

I did 20 hours on italki over 1 week, just practicing conversation with community tutors. After the 20 hours noticed a concrete improvement. 

 

Brilliant. That's exactly what I need.

[Flickserve]

They just killed their instant tutoring function. That's a pity. It was their best asset.

[zander1]

8 minutes ago, Flickserve said:

They just killed their instant tutoring function. That's a pity. It was their best asset.

 

Seems like a pretty stupid idea, doesn't make sense for me to just remove a feature. I looked at their announcement but they don't give any real reason. Any ideas why?

[zander1]

Also, since they've updated their website Italki is also horrible to use. It's actually quite painful to book lessons and the excessive messages/notifications are really annoying.

 

They're lucky they have a good product...

[889]

"It was tough overcoming my hatred of video calling . . . "

 

If like me you feel self-conscious with that camera on, then turn if off and have an ordinary phone conversation. I don't think video adds much.

 

In any event, I think Italki really comes into its own on more obscure languages than Chinese, when you're unlikely to find a native tutor locally.

[Flickserve]

12 hours ago, zander1 said:

Any ideas why?

 

Absolutely no clue.

 

When I first joined, the instant tutoring would give a little repeated ringtone  that would stop when the teacher accepted the request. Very good!

 

But they changed it to no ringing and you had to keep looking at the webpage to see if it confirmed. I had a few failures with that whereas the old system was pretty good. Maybe they removed it because of the failures?

 

I had two instant lessons on the same day last week. Same topic, different people. Good learning experience to have the same topic with a different person.

[Flickserve]

I had a look at italki again after a couple of years absent. The number of tutors has exploded. Was it the pandemic? Partly China’s new de-emphasis on academic tutoring for school aged children has squeezed educationalists and some have them have found their way onto italki. My impression is community tutors just there for talking have decreased and many professional teachers are in the community category. Maybe italki is limiting the numbers in their pro category so other professional teachers start off in community  until having built up enough lesson to be ‘promoted’. An offshoot of this is community tutor prices are not as inexpensive as before. Quite sad. Then again, the prices for learning Chinese aren’t really so high compared to some other languages.

 

I came across a instant tutoring function - it was good to have an ad hoc conversation. However, italki tried to control it through the website with a talk function, It failed miserably and we switched to WeChat. Shortly after, italki killed the instant tutoring function and I haven’t seen it since.

[amytheorangutan]

I still use italki until now. I started in June 2020. I honestly only ever tried professional teachers and I think my current teacher increased her price a bit since I started. I don’t have very regular lessons as I also have weekly lessons with a local teacher and funnily enough my italki teacher is now a little bit more expensive than my local teacher but I like to keep my italki teacher mainly because I think we have similar interests and I really enjoy the lessons which mainly just us talking about all kind of stuff in our lives and sometimes she’d bring up a topic with more structured lesson, luckily she normally chooses topics that interest me. 
 

I’ve only had trials with 3 professional teachers. Had a few more lessons with one of them but then I decided to stick with my current teacher since. I feel sometimes when I have one on one lesson with a new teacher it can be a bit awkward and the awkwardness sometimes carry on if you don’t have that much in common with them unless you stick to a textbook/more structured lesson, so I’m a little reluctant to change or try out lots of teachers.