Lingostan, 1 on 1 lessons with native Chinese teachers. Promotion: free lessons and 10 USD gift

[Andrew78]

Lingostan, 1 on 1 lessons with native Chinese teachers. Promotion: free lessons and 10 USD gift

 

Hello everybody,

 

first of all I'd like to thank the Admin, Roddy, for allowing me to open this thread. I am one of the founders of http://www.lingostan.com/ , Andrea Mucciolo, and as you can see I joined this forum two tyears ago since I'm learning Chinese, even though now I don't have much time for that.  

 

Lingostan is a new community for teachers, where you’ll be able to have online lessons with native teachers of all languages. I'm posting here because we already have some native Chinese teachers from Mainland China and, most of all, there is a promotion: new users/students will get a 10 USD gift in their wallet, to book lessons and, moreover, every new user has also the right to 3 free trial lessons, in order to get to know the website and see how it works.  There is no catch, no credit card required, really free. Following the links of some profiles, I'm posting here since we are still working on the internal search bar to filter the language taught. 

 

(you can watch the teacher presentation video)

 

http://www.lingostan.com/view-profile/CF8SS5/  (professional teacher)

 

http://www.lingostan.com/view-profile/CF7AU4/ (professional teacher)

 

http://www.lingostan.com/view-profile/GU5SU3/ (professional teacher)

 

http://www.lingostan.com/view-profile/NN9GI9/  (professional teacher)

 

http://www.lingostan.com/view-profile/SB5VE4/ (tutor)

 

you can even just have informal conversation with the teachers. More are coming, we don't know yet when the promotion will end but again there is really no catch, registration is simple and easy, we don't ask for any payment data.

 

If you have any questions, please ask me. I hope this is something you guys can find useful. Of course we just started, the site is complex, there are many functions and we're implementing even more, so we apologize for any flaw we are fixing and please report to us any problem you may encounter, we'd be glad to assist you in order to make you enjoy your free lessons.

Of course this is the reason why the site now is completely free (but we pay our teachers). This is a sort of “beta version”.

 

Thank you again

 

Andrea

[889]

I just wanted to see what languages you support, but couldn't find a clear answer on your home page, and it looks like you have to register to move beyond the home page. Languages offered should be right there at the top and easy to find.

[Andrew78]

Hi,

 

thanks for the feedback, no, you don't have to register in order to see the languages and the teachers, you just click the top link above "teachers" and you get here: http://www.lingostan.com/index-en where you can see all languages and teachers.

[Tomsima]

"Lingostan - the land of languages"

 

> does not offer languages that use -stan suffix.

 

perhaps it's in the works, I guess it's understandable if you guys have just started up, but the brand name definitely gave me a false impression. eg. "italki" (oh so I'm talking with someone eye to eye), "memrise" (memorise things, memory rises), "lingostan" (ah the land of Persian languages).

 

that aside, why is "Chinese" listed as a language choice? are teachers of all different Chinese languages grouped together, or does this solely mean "putonghua/Mandarin"? felt this made things much less clearer than italki.

 

As someone preparing to book some classes with Cantonese teachers over Skype, should I be considering your website?

 

congrats on getting everything online, can imagine it must have taken a lot of organisation.

 

additional note: for mobile users the website is still awkward to navigate. cannot return to the front page once you've clicked through to the index page. the logo is different on different areas of the website. when searching for teachers it seems you /must/ choose a gender for your teacher. I want to see all Chinese teachers, so I drop down and select Chinese. there is no submit button, and no reaction from the website. it is only when you specify gender that the form submits. this made me feel pretty uncomfortable to be honest, as if there is some gender segregation in Lingostan…

[Andrew78]

Hi,

 

thanks for the feedback, we are still fixing things so that's why you are seeing this little issues, of course we'll implement the search bar, now it's still currently under development. At the moment we don't have yet Cantonese Teachers. In a few days we'll fix these things. We decided to open the site, for free, also to get this kind of feedback, very useful to us, even though of course many things were already planned. Regarding the name, well, it's interesting what you said: yes, we chose "lingo" plus "stan" to get the idea of a land, country, of languages, there is also Hindustan, Kazakistan, Pakistan and others, we havent received yey many feedback for the name, at any rate I guess that when you come to the site you get the idea of many languages, not just one. But I found insteresting your comment, I'm interested to see the reaction on the name. 

 

Edit: I just checked from mobile: if you just click "language taught" without selecting anything else, it will give you all the Chinese teachers, both male and female.

[889]

". . . this made me feel pretty uncomfortable to be honest, as if there is some gender segregation in Lingostan."

 

Ditto the prominence of teachers' ages.

 

(Actually, I thought of mangosteen when I first saw the name.)

 

[Flickserve]

The age of the tutor is irrelevant.

 

Keep getting a repeated popup saying my browser time and the time set is different.

 

Taiwan is listed as a province of China.....

[Andrew78]

Hi, thank you very much for the feedback, we are going to fix these things. 

[edelweis]

6 hours ago, Andrew78 said:

we are going to fix these things.

 

I'm actually curious to know whether any teacher protests about the Taiwan thing.

[Tomsima]

"Here we have all kind of languages, even the most rare and unusual, so not only the obvious one like English, Spanish, German, Chinese etc."

 

I'm only doing this because I like the fact you want to start a website like this and hope it succeeds: onto the criticism:

 

this is not written by a native English speaker (ie. 'so' is not used best in this way, 'one' should be pluralised., 'obvious' is not rhetorically the right choice of word), so there is a chance the customer will not trust the authenticity of the site. in order for you to succeed, I feel a good move would be to run all English by a native (and proficient) English speaker before putting it on the site. it's a language site, so it needs to be tight on the presentation of its language if it wants to convince customers.

 

the font should not be justified on the mobile site, it is awkward to read, the reason being the gaps between words are too large. if you must justify, do inside a text box that doesn't crawl right to the edge of the phone screen. whoever is coding your website is doing a good job but needs to up it a little

[Lu]

On 28/10/2017 at 3:28 PM, edelweis said:

I'm actually curious to know whether any teacher protests about the Taiwan thing.

Taiwanese teachers might. Or students might. I might.

[Andrew78]

Hi,

 

sorry for the late reply, I've been very busy. Again I want to thank all the people who commented in this topic giving their opinion. As I said we just started and are still in the process of  arranging many things, but now I'm happy to say that we have an English native speaker from the US in our team, so we've already rewritten the home page content and are going to rewrite other pages as well. I also wanted to give another gift to this forum users: we'll give you 20 USD as a welcome gift and not 10 USD, so you'll be able to book a full hour lesson totally free. I'd recommend to you this professional  Chinese teacher: http://www.lingostan.com/view-profile/CF8SS5/ as you can see she already got two positive reviews.

 

After you register, just send an email to: support[at] lingostan.com, telling us the email you've used to register and stating that you saw the promotion in this forum and we'll add another 10 USD in your student wallet, so you'll have a total 0f 20 USD, plus the 3 free trial lesson. The site is progressing, by the end of the month we'll add other functions so the site will be fully working (now it's still in a sort of "beta version").

 

Any other question you might have, just let me know, thank you.

 

Andrea

[RaMa09]

A few questions:

 

1) Do you vet people's claims of educational background? The teacher you linked to says they have a Master's degree from Tsinghua. Not saying she is lying, but I'd like that to be verified if possible.

 

2) Trial lessons are only 15 minutes, I feel that it needs to be at least 30 minutes in order to get an idea of what the teacher is like and whether they are suitable to you

 

3) Is this website not just a blatant ripoff of italki?

[Andrew78]

Hi,

 

I answer your questions:

 

1) Yes, we do: teachers have to upload all their documentation in their private area in order to get listed, so we can easily check them. We also have collaborators from many countries, including China (in fact we have Chinese contents on our website) so this help us to check even better the validity of a document in other languages. On our site, teachers cannot hide their qualifications and the place where they obtained them, wheras in other sites they can, so we think that this help to avoid any possible lie about that, since teachers fill in on their own all the data taking resposiblity for it, but anyway, as stated above, we have all the original documents. Maybe soon we could give teachers the option of showing directly the document on their profile, of course hiding sensibile data;

 

2) considering that they are free, we thought 15 minutes to be the right amount of time, the trial lessons is intended more to see how the site works and get to know a teacher before booking a full hour lesson (students have 3 free trial lessons), take also into account that now we pay the teachers for the free trials, but maybe in the future (we are still assesing this)  it'll be up to them to give a free trial or not, and many we already know don't like the idea. Moreover, remember you have also a 10 USD gift from us (which by the way for this forum users become 20) so while the trial lessons last only 15 minutes, with the other 10 USD you can easily get another 30 minutes free or even 1 hour, depending on the teachers fees;

 

3) the basic function are the same for every site of this kind, you cannot invent much. I'm very passionate about languages so I don't hide the fact that over the last 5 years I attended many websites where I could speak with teachers and tutors of several languages. Of course, I did not say I had a great idea, since it's nothing new, but now the site has just been launched, it has only the basic functions, so it may look very similar to others, but soon there'll be other functions which we planned by ourselves. It's only too normal to make what one knows well and has experience about, but you are always going to add your personal touch. 

[Andrew78]

Hi there,

 

just a quick update: since someone from this forum asked me about a Cantonese teacher sometime ago, just wanted to say that now we have a native Cantonese teacher: https://www.lingostan.com/en/teacher/IA7NI1/ and also, for these forum users, besides the 3 free lessons, we give 20 USD instead of 10 in their wallet, so you can try this and other teachers totally free. After you register just write to: support@lingostan.com saying you come from this forum and we'll had money for you.

 

Thank you