italki

[wezel]

Hello - I thought to give a plug for italki. For less than the price of a Starbucks coffee per hour, I've had over 70 sessions of private tutoring from a variety of teachers. I'm not disciplined - or smart enough - to learn on my own so having a tutor is really helpful for me. I've used several different teachers and the quality is not consistent but hey, many of them offer really cheap trial lessons so one can afford to try different people out.

And no, I don't have shares, vested interests or friends on italki!

[giraffe]

I also had a good experience with iTalki. I only tried one teacher but she seemed pretty good and fun to work with, so I've stuck with her. It'll be two years this summer. The only downside is that she raised her rates quite a lot from what she originally advertised. I believe it was originally $3 per hour and now it's $13 but it still seems pretty reasonable for an hour in private with a competent teacher (and she emails the lesson notes and a recording after the class). We stopped arranging classes through iTalki after a while, since there was no longer a reason to give them a cut.

[creamyhorror]

@giraffe: How do you pay your tutor? Do many tutors maintain Paypal accounts? I had the impression Paypal wasn't that common (e.g. among Taobao sellers), but I might be completely wrong.

(I'm looking at italki, and it looks like processing fees take 3-4% of all fees. That's fine initially but a bit too much to pay for an automated web platform, and I personally wouldn't pay more than a marketplace fee of 4% or so of the first year's fees.)

[icebear]

Thought I would also note my good experience with the service, at least for Spanish courses (and there does seem to be a good amount of Chinese tutors at reasonable rates).

[putonghua73]

Glad to see that iTalki has a thread, as it is one of a number of resources that I plan to evaluate to find a Chinese teacher / tutor on-line during weekend mornings to help provide structure to my Chinese learning (once I properly kick-start it again).

From my brief preview of the site, there does seem to be a wide disparity between rates, and the disparity doesn't always correlate with qualification, teaching experience, yada yada yada.

Once my assignments are out of the way in a couple of weeks, I'll compare:

• Chineseteachers.com
  
• echineselearning.com
  
• italki.com
  

I'll probably try italki rather than the other options due to a wider range of teachers, and I rather follow my own programme than a pre-prepared programme ala echineselearning.com

My PQQ criteria will be:

• native speaker
  
• degree-level qualification in teaching Chinese as a foreign language or Chinese language / literature
  

Of course, as abcdefg has mentioned in his posts, the most important variable is one's relationship with one's potential teacher / tutor in terms of personality and understanding of needs and wants.

Good to know that other learners are getting benefit from the site. The difficult aspect about such marketplaces is having the necessary tools to evaluate competence, etc - which is why trials and learner feedback is so important to validate a teacher's / tutor's profile.

Cheers!

[creamyhorror]

Just a bit of a personal blog:

I've been using tutors on italki for tutoring my brother (who's finishing primary school). It doesn't work very well if the student doesn't take an active role in asking questions and clarifying unfamiliar expressions. I often have to interrupt to let the tutor know that my brother probably doesn't understand some words she used; and then she has to take a few sentences to explain it, often somewhat imprecisely or at a level that he still doesn't understand fully.

All I've really been doing is entering all the new expressions they come across into Anki. But it feels like I'm trying to plug a hole where there are twenty more - there are always more words he doesn't understand in most things they say. I don't know if I should ask them to lower the level of their Chinese even further to accommodate him, because when they go into "simple mode" they start telling him things that are really too basic. In any case, it's enough of a rush entering phrases into Anki during the lesson and he certainly won't do it himself after it's over - not properly, at least.

I'm thinking of getting someone to just read a storybook with him, perhaps alternating lines, just to get him interested in a long piece of writing, which would hopefully help him pay attention. I suspect it wouldn't work, though, because he doesn't have that sort of attention span in Chinese.

How do you guys carry out your lessons? Do you follow a textbook? Do your teachers have material prepared? How about free conversation sessions - how do you make those count? Advice and experiences are greatly appreciated.

[putonghua73]

Thought I would update the thread based upon my experiences using iTalki to find a personal tutor.

I selected the first tutor after reviewing her qualifications, student feedback and rates against a short-list of other tutors. She was terrible - the worst Chinese teacher I have encountered whilst learning Chinese. Both trial lessons consisted little more of a series of parrot questions pitched at the level 你是不是英国人？ No feedback, no explanations - simply repeat the question and anwser in parrot fashion.

I left constructive feedback and moved on.

My other short-listed teacher (and present teacher since July) is in her mid-20s, Masters in teaching Chinese as a foreign language (Kunming), as well as a linguistics background. We immediately hit it off and lessons with her are a delight. She is flexible, versatile, able to introduce grammatical points and explanations, new vocabulary, provide example usage, encourages me to speak, and picks me up on my tones - particularly 'c' pronunciations.

Our conversations are free-form ranging from Chinese belief in animal / star signs as a predictive tool for relationship matches, Tang dynasty poetry (she has a classics Chinese background), our respective experience of Kunming, her life when she lived in Thailand, family, friends, relationships, Chinese current affairs, films, books, tv shows, etc. We recently talked about playing 三国杀 and 狼人.

She is also inquisitive, clever and our lessons are filled with laughter. A really wonderful teacher.

Price is $9 an hour and I have 2 hours on Saturday and 2 hours on Sunday.

I hope she still has time when she makes a decision over future towards the end of October.

I have been spammed with a million and 1 language requests that I automatically reject because I have zero time for language requests that are not based in London due to time-zone differences.

The only problem is, of course, mine re: finding time to review, study and prepare during the week.

[realmayo]

Just want to echo the above enthusiasm for iTalki: I started using it last week, had five lessons so far, which in total cost about the same as one hour face-to-face in London. In the past I never went for iTalki or similar because I figured Skype would be much worse than face-to-face, but that isn't the case at all. For my purposes, which is regular conversation, it's excellent.

 

Time zones mean that I need to be up early before work for tutors based in China, but there are several in Europe or the US which means they're online in the evenings too.

 

The website's system for booking lessons and paying for them seems very easy and fair.

 

Now that the initial introduction-type conversations have run their course I now just need to work out how to find stuff to talk about each time....

[anonymoose]

Is sound quality good enough over the internet that it doesn't affect efficacy? I've never tried italki, but just from listening to Chinese TV, it cannot compare with face to face dialogue.

[realmayo]

So far all of the tutors have used Skype, so that's the quality I've been getting.  

 

If you'd be looking for intensive feedback on enunciation, syllable by syllable, then you might be disappointed.

 

There was only one tutor where the sound was a bit dodgy, probably her internet was slow, but even then it was no impediment to conversation. So in terms of delivering what I needed, sound quality was fine to perfect. And then when you consider that not all conversations in real life will be conducted in perfect quiet....

 

Edit: I should add that the quality is easily good enough for me to be told off for not using enough ch/sh/zhs, or for discussing how to distinguish between different dialects' tones and so on.

[Sarskate]

I'm really enjoying italki, but it can take a while to find a teacher who fits. I tried a few until my sister's teacher from when she studied in china joined up. Now I use her as well. My only advice is if someone doesn't fit you then just find another.

[889]

Italki credits expire after you haven't logged in for a year.

 

Used to be they'd send you a warning email a week or two before the credits would expire. Now you just get an email the day after, "Sorry, sucker!"

 

Scum.

[Flickserve]

They have also deleted the option for Skype details.