Thank you @JimLeu_italki! I am now more relieved after hearing so many people giving the thumbs up to iTalki as a way of learning foreign languages.
Just a question here, when you book a class and the tutor accepts it, will he/she send you a message on iTalki to inform you about what is going to be covered on the first lesson?
So think of italki as a just the platform that facilitates scheduling and payment between you and your teacher. What you want to cover during the first lesson is really up to you or the teacher. If you book a specific course that the teacher has prepared ahead of time, then you’ll do that course. If you select “Conversation Practice”, you’ll practice speaking and they teacher will correct your mistakes (I like using a shared google doc)
In my experience as a teacher and student on italki, the first lesson always looks almost identical.
This has been true even for my advanced students who come in for specific issues like accent reduction or preparing a presentation for work.
I strongly feel that italki is a great tool for Student-Centric learning. This is a concept that I think most Polyglots can appreciate as Polyglots in general self-learn languages. They figure out the system that works best for them and they stick to it… sometimes changing it up until they learn the langauge.
If you really know how to take control of your learning, then treat italki Teachers as a tool. You tell the teacher how you want to learn (let’s do Conversation Practice today, let’s work on my pronunciation in this lesson, let’s read this article outload and I want you to write down all the words I’m having trouble with on my Google doc).
There are some days when I’m really just lazy and I prepare nothing but I come to an italki lesson and because I’ve had many, many lessons with my teachers, it’s just kind of like catching up with an old friend. I try to tell them about my week, what I did over the weekend, etc… in my target language and we keep a running Google Doc of everything. Other days I feel super motivated and I ask my teacher to assign me homework like… write a paragraph about xxxx or summarize this article and we’ll go over it in the next class.
My advice is just to have fun with it. The fact that italki connects you to real people who really, really love it that you are so enthusiastic about learning their language is what makes it enjoyable for me. I look forward to my lessons and none of my teachers are judgmental. It’s a safe place to make speaking mistakes, ask questions etc… for an hour.
Actually watch Gerry Weitz’s never stop learning video in Saturn Theater. We interviewed him for the Conference and he talks about how he learns on italki (he’s definitely one of our bigger fans) but I was honored to meet him,
Thank you guys for sharing your experiences with me. It really made me feel a lot better and less worried about using iTalki. I have went out and booked 2 trial lessons, Thai and Vietnamese. I am excited but a little worried at the same time. I am a beginner in Thai so it’s easier for the teacher to match my current A2 level with his materials but I’m already at an intermediate level for Vietnamese so I am not sure how the trial lesson will turn out.
Let me know how it goes… I’ve tried a lot of the Vietnamese teachers (they are generally super cheap) and can recommend some of my regular teachers.
Your Japanese is probably at a much higher level than mine. I’ve only been learning for a year now. I’ll PM you
It depended of what I wanted to do with my languages. If I wanted to learn a language, I booked teachers. If I wanted speaking practice and corrections, I booked a tutor.
I’d like to know more about the ethics around changing tutors. There are 4 main aspects I’m interested in:
We don’t always know how effective the session will turn out to be, and we shouldn’t really judge the tutor from our first impression. How soon will you realize it’s time to change the tutor and what exactly would you expect from the tutor during the first session?
Who decides on the agenda and how do you agree what the session will be about? As beginners we don’t always know what we need to start with.
Many Italki tutors are not professional teachers, some are just native speakers with or without teaching experience. Would you recommend trying out italki tutors to someone who has friends among native speakers and doesn’t really need a paid “video chat”?
Do you get the feedback from abandoned tutors asking what went wrong and why you stopped booking them? How do you announce the departure if at all? Is it really an issue or it’s pretty common to have one time students at italki?
Thanks!
To answer your questions:
I would always book a trial lesson and afterwards a couple of single lessons to really be able to see if the teacher and I match. Only when I’m certain of this, I will book a package eventually. For me the first trial lesson is just to get to know each other, get to know the program of the teacher and tell them my goals etc.
I always decide this together with the teacher. Especially with languages I already know to some degree we usually talk about what I want to work on in the first (trial) lesson.
That depends on what you want. For example I’m studying French and Arabic on italki right now. For each language I have a professional teacher for normal lessons and a community tutor for conversation practice. While I do have friends who speak those languages, we haven’t got nearly enough time to meet often enough for it to count as real conversation practice.
Well, I never abandoned a tutor because we didn’t match or anything like that. I did do a couple of on time lessons now during the language challenge, but I told each teacher and tutor in advance that I booked this lesson only because of the language challenge and that it would most likely be a one time lesson as I wanted to practice speaking with as many different persons as possible during this time. They all accepted my lesson requests and had no problem with this being a one time lesson.
Hi, I had a lot of Italki lessons this year. I made a video about how to get the most out of your Italki teacher. I think Italki is good but you have to choose the right teacher for you and let them know exactly what you want. Some teachers are not qualified and are just there for conversation. Others are not very experienced and try to teach you the traditional way like in the school classroom.
Best wishes, and I’d be interested to find out how you get on.
Andy
@Andy That’s great that you made a video of your experiences! Would you be interested in sharing your video with the rest of our Community?
If so, PM me and I can embed your video in a article that you can write around the video. In return, italki can help promote your video to our Community and even link to your YouTube channel. It would be similar to what Melissa Fallin did - she recorded a great YouTube italki FAQ so she wrote some content around her original YouTube video (summarizing her video)
There was a similar discussion about etiquette for leaving teachers on Reddit:
Hi Jim,
Yes, that would be great. I’ll write something up and get back to you.
Many thanks,
Andy
To find a teacher you really like and whom you’ll stick with, you will likely have to go through several trial lessons. Even then, I’ve taken lessons with people who I liked for the first few lessons, but then I hit a wall and felt like I did not get anything from them anymore. But that could have been me.
As an intermediate in Italian, I found someone I connected well with. Somehow my weekly lessons evolved into watching the Netflix series “Baby”. Each week I would watch an episode, and I focused on several things. 1) I wrote down vocabulary and expressions which I found unusual, useful, couldn’t find in the dictionary, or if they were common expressions 2) On a shared Google doc, I wrote a summary of what the episode was about (4-5 paragraphs) using many of those expressions, and stretching above my level 3) During the lesson, I would read it to her, and then she went over it making corrections on grammar, and correcting my awkward sentence structure 4) The following week, I did the same, but incorporated the corrections from the week before. After 3 months of this, I made a lot of progress. The side effect was that I talked like a teenager.
Unfortunately, she had raised her prices so much I could not afford them anymore. Now that I’m learning Spanish, I’m incorporating similar tactics with my current teacher. I’m watching Elite and Puerta 7, although I’m not writing down my summaries. Plus, she gives me material to look at as well.
That’s so cool. I love hearing about the different and unusual ways that students come up with to learn with their teachers. I’ve watched TV shows too but never thought of making it a learning exercise. TV Show language learning sounds like a lot of fun.
P.S. Found this part especially funny:
“The side effect was that I talked like a teenager.”
It’s totally true. If you watch cooking shows, sports, police crime dramas, medical or law dramas, you definitely hear more vocabulary of that genre. In this case, they are Telenovelas for a young adult audience, so you hear more slang which older adults don’t use. Some of the expressions are not on Google, so I have to use the ‘urban dictionary’ of that country to find out what they mean.
Your video and article are up!
Thanks for the quick turnaround Andy. Actually if there is anyone here in the Polyglot Conference who has created italki Videos about learning or teaching… I’m more than happy to put up your content in our Community to test it out.
One of the things that I want to do with the italki Community is have the content actually be written by our actual italki Teachers and Students.
My biggest concerns are that (1) they are real and (2) they can help other italki users / language learners learn a language.
Does anyone have any recommendations for Mexican Spanish teachers on iTalki? I am thinking of starting Spanish lessons but there are just too many teachers out there and I have only 1 more trial class left so I’m thinking of getting recommendations here. Thank you 