Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

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acorngalaxy
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Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby acorngalaxy » Mon Nov 14, 2022 1:38 pm

Don't get me wrong, I like Italki, but I happened to come across videos of this YouTuber the other day:

https://youtu.be/6nP9uXVqZT8

https://youtu.be/j15g-d0Yo_8

https://youtu.be/qQc53c9Zitc

I actually found myself agreeing with him on a lot of points. I don't know if it's because he presents himself well, I don't know if I'm being influenced. All I know is that he made me think about the money spent on conversation practice. Is it a waste of money? Is it all for naught? What do you think ?
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby Le Baron » Mon Nov 14, 2022 2:33 pm

I'm not quite sure I understand the point of the main discussion in the first video. Though it clearly links to his personal thesis (a sort of Krashen adaptation: language is knowledge) regarding how he thinks language is learned. I don't agree with his rigid presentation of this, because you simply can't just learn a language by pursuing 'knowledge' in a language you don't know. And he is insistent that 'language teaching' is make-believe, so it appears he thinks you never have to learn any structural content. In the second video he made a compilation of people saying 'don't study grammar', so I don't really know what he is arguing or if it is a parody or if he's just confused.

Italki though... If it's being used for what a person thinks they need then I suppose they're getting what they wanted. The bearded fellow says he prefers to teach points of language which people are stuck on. That seems to me a worthwhile thing for those who can't work it out and can't find someone they can just ask. And of course if the 'lessons' one is getting are in the TL you're just getting speaking practice automatically. That's not just 'paying for a conversation'. The person paying can make these requirements.

I'm sure there must be dodgy self-appointed teachers who are just stringing people along. The lack of progress with one of these should be a clue.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby ryanheise » Mon Nov 14, 2022 2:40 pm

acorngalaxy wrote:I happened to come across videos of this YouTuber the other day:

https://youtu.be/6nP9uXVqZT8

https://youtu.be/j15g-d0Yo_8

https://youtu.be/qQc53c9Zitc

I actually found myself agreeing with him on a lot of points. [...] What do you think ?


Would you consider summarising the specific points in those videos that you agreed with?

The videos you linked total over an hour in length, and they appear to have a low density of information, particularly the second 19 minute video which looks 18 minutes too long. If you could write a list of points, that might be a more helpful way to spark a discussion.
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acorngalaxy
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby acorngalaxy » Mon Nov 14, 2022 2:48 pm

Yeah no problem.

Here is what he said regarding speaking practice, summarised:


Speaking practice lessons are a complete and utter waste of time and money, as foreign languages shouldn't exist as a separate subject. As a result of this, Italki , Preply and other similar platforms bring no ROI at all.





ryanheise wrote:
acorngalaxy wrote:I happened to come across videos of this YouTuber the other day:

https://youtu.be/6nP9uXVqZT8

https://youtu.be/j15g-d0Yo_8

https://youtu.be/qQc53c9Zitc

I actually found myself agreeing with him on a lot of points. [...] What do you think ?


Would you consider summarising the specific points in those videos that you agreed with?

The videos you linked total over an hour in length, and they appear to have a low density of information, particularly the second 19 minute video which looks 18 minutes too long. If you could write a list of points, that might be a more helpful way to spark a discussion.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby garyb » Mon Nov 14, 2022 2:55 pm

ryanheise wrote:Would you consider summarising the specific points in those videos that you agreed with?

The videos you linked total over an hour in length, and they appear to have a low density of information, particularly the second 19 minute video which looks 18 minutes too long. If you could write a list of points, that might be a more helpful way to spark a discussion.
Agreed. The titles, never mind the length, put me straight off spending any time of my life watching the videos.

Based on the titles and the mention of iTalki (which is just a service to arrange lessons with tutors), I'm concerned that the discussion could just turn into yet another beating of two of the longest-suffering dead horses on here: whether tutors are useful, and whether there's value in explicit study and teaching versus just input. So it would be useful to know what specific points are raised beyond that.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby Sae » Mon Nov 14, 2022 3:00 pm

I'll take a look at the videos in a bit, but I figure state my view on iTalki and see if my opinion changes after watching them.

For me, what has made it worthwhile:

- Native speakers I can speak to regularly who can pull me away from textbook language and more into how people actually speak.
- use the language with somebody who speaks it from the moment I start learning
- The pricing is pretty affordable
- Instant corrections and a space where you can experiment with immediate feedback
- hands on help with pronunciation
- a window to learn about social and cultural aspects of the country of the target language & travel advice
- personalised lessons from somebody who gets to know you and what works and doesn't work for you, as they are adaptive.
- motivation & help when struggling
- accountability for not practicing or not booking lessons (they want your custom, I usually get reminded if i've forgotten to book)
- a friend in or from your target country. My Vietnamese tutor is planning a day out for us of things he thinks I'll like.
- A platform where you can post things that native speakers will give feedback and corrections on
- A platform with prompts for practicing your languages
- A huge library of potential people to learn from, especially for languages you might struggle to find good language learning resources for
- Somebody who'll offer recommended materials and thing you might like that you can use between lessons

If I were to look at cons.
Star ratings aren't very good for comparing tutors. I can see why, if you like your tutor and they're doing a good job, you feel less inclined to mark them down, so it means most people have 5 stars and if it's any lower than 4.8 you start to worry if a few people have had a terrible experience, even though in most contexts 4.8 is a near perfect score.
I feel like it should work more like Steam reviews, where it only says whether the person recommends the tutor or not, because you're just looking at the comments to get an idea of what people's experiences are.

You feel inclined to keep booking lessons, which can be a bad thing and a good thing. Good in that it keeps you moving forward, but a bad thing is I imagine it's hard to know when you should stop and whether it is more economically viable at a certain stage to do other things to improve your language with similar or greater benefit. I guess if you get to the point where you're confident and just speaking well, you probably are at a good point to stop.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby LupCenușiu » Mon Nov 14, 2022 3:24 pm

acorngalaxy wrote:Speaking practice lessons are a complete and utter waste of time and money, as foreign languages shouldn't exist as a separate subject. As a result of this, Italki , Preply and other similar platforms bring no ROI at all.


Sure. That's why for thousands of years people were not able to teach other people foreign languages. Only the blessed ones that woke up in a morning speaking in tongues managed such a feat of strength.

Also, I'm biased. When you start a video with "the absurdity called language teaching / learning" or "THE TRUTH about LANGUAGE LEARNING" you create the premise that somehow you have access to some higher, revolutionary truth, and from the kindness of your hearth you decide to drag the masses kicking and screaming from the dark chasm of ignorance. More often than not, you don't, you are just the equivalent of the d2d "encyclopedia" seller, over the internet, except that is pulp fiction. You abuse terms that are supposed to create curiosity, and ideally to undermine previous knowledge, using tabloid techniques. Just parlor tricks, really. While learning new things should be, indeed, a lifelong process, I'd rather not indulge this kind of people. Especially as I don't keep the coins of my time in a bottomless purse.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby Sae » Mon Nov 14, 2022 5:51 pm

I started watching the videos and think I watched enough to get the basic argument, my apologies, an hour's worth of videos was probably a bit much for me now, but I saw enough to match your summary and I didn't find him engaging enough (because of repetition) to do more than that.

I feel like the arguments are less to do with iTalki & its competitors, but how people learn language but I think the premise I dunno, ends up coming off as a bit pretentious?

And I am trying to see his argument, I think maybe in cases there's points certain things can be helpful, but framing the alternatives to his approach as a mistake language learners make and that the approach he references is the correct way feels too narrow and rigid.

I think it is good to have focus and know the kind of things you want to talk about and his saying if you want to learn to talk about The Joker movie then you learn about how people talk about movies and so on. So in the end you might know how to talk about other movies. So I think points like that could be good advice.

But I also think it is good to be able to be flexible in your language. Let's say we did the thing of learning about 18th Century France but in Spanish, but we're done talking about 18th Century France in Spanish and what we've learned may be useful for also talking about 14th Century Sweden, but the guy we're talking to starts a conversation about migratory birds and maybe they're talking about the African swallow.

You might not have thought to learn about this topic or any related topics, so will you know what they are saying or talking about? Could you express your own views, ideas and understanding about migratory birds? It seems like with his approach I'd need to have learned how to talk about it in the language or something of the same or similar topic.

As I understand it, if my knowledge of the language is flexible, I could find a way of expressing it, it might not be in the most correct way possible if it's not a topic I've spoken about in the language. If there is something I don't understand, then I have plenty of tools to ask questions and the person I'm speaking to might be able to explain it in some way I understand and in the process...I also learn another way of expressing certain ideas that a native speaker might use. And this is my experience of non-native English speakers, they do this if I say something they don't understand (sometimes it is native English speakers too, because of dialect).

And then I think about the practicalities of some of his assertions, like the idea language shouldn't be its own 'subject' and goes onto say things like "language is history, language is art, language is programming, language is fashion etc.", but we don't learn those things multilingually, I didn't learn history in English and German, I didn't learn programming in English and German, I didn't learn art in English and German. I learned German as a separate subject, granted, not very well but that's more an issue of the how the British education system teaches language. And now I am learning Vietnamese and Mongolian, so if I had learned them in English and German, it'd not help my Vietnamese and Mongolian. And would I need to relearn everything in my worldview again but in Vietnamese and Mongolian? Of course languages are a separate subject, because you learn them separately from learning other things, sure you learn those other things and interact and understand them in your native language, but i's not how it works for a second or third language. Whilst you can immerse yourself and use the language in a whole plethora of things, but it's still something separate from those things that you're learning.

But if give benefit of the doubt, maybe he's trying to say in a roundabout and pretentious way that "we use language to interact with the world and our understanding is based on it, so we should learn to interact with the world in our new language and it's good to focus on certain topics when learning a language to enhance our comprehension, and not just learn words and grammar alone," which I think most people do? Heck, it's what my teachers do on iTalki. And if the case, it's not really new dialogue or anything special? Unless I'm missing something, but then I didn't watch everything because brevity isn't this guy's strong point (because he insists on repeating points over and over and over).
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby Odair » Mon Nov 14, 2022 8:27 pm

I have used it a lot for conversation practice for languages I'm high level. I would not use it to work on a lower level language as it would be too expensive and time-consuming.

Languages from countries with weak currencies have good teachers for a very good price.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby dlt529 » Tue Nov 15, 2022 1:02 am

So I got a copy of his book and skimmed throught it (it was on kindle unlimited! What luck /sarcasm). This guy is best described as pretentious, poorly read Stephen Krashen.

His method is best characterized by an input-heavy approach that prioritizes reading (versus the aural input that most Krashenites prefer). He is very critical of speaking, the skill. For him, langauge is a tool for consuming content (gaining new knowledge), and speaking is an after thought. You should ideally learn to read, listen, and then speak. Krashenist approaches to language learning claim that output begins happening spontaneously after enough input, which is what I'm assuming he's going for.

The problem is that he doesn't cite any linguists (besides Krashen and Chomsky, sparingly). There's a LOT of evidence to dispute all of his points, but he just kind of waves it away. He also doesn't explain why or how he arrived at these conclusions. Second language acquisition is a social science, it's driven by data and the scientific method. His ideas seem most similar to the kind of philosophy research, where people think about something a lot without really considering data.

I wouldn't trust any of his conclusions. If you buy into the concept that langauge learning is only a tool for consuming content (not for speakign to people), then it follows that iTalki is not a good investment. If, on the other hand, you actually want to speak to another person and communicate, iTalki is a great tool.
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