Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby lingua » Tue Nov 15, 2022 3:21 am

I didn't listen to the videos, however I've used italki tutors for the last 5-6 years mostly for Italian with the primary objective to get a solid hour of conversation every week as well as get any grammar questions answered. I don't do lessons. I have come across some teachers that want to do lessons but I made sure they understood up front that I'm only interested in conversing and rarely if ever had an issue with it.

I know language exchanges are available but I don't find them very effective. To many of the Italian speakers already have a high level of English and in my experience I wasn't getting a 50-50 exchange a lot of the time. For me it's worth the money because my time is limited and I'd rather not waste it with mindless chatter in English at this point in my life. As far as the rating system ... I don't care. It's really up to the student whether or not the tutor/teacher/whatever is a good fit. If you feel you're getting good value for your money then it's worth it. If you're not then it's a waste.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby Tom » Tue Nov 15, 2022 5:20 am

I only had one lesson there, as a beginner, so I don't know. One place I think it could really shine is for conversational practice with native speakers. That only works though, if you are advanced enough to have meaningful conversations.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby acorngalaxy » Tue Nov 15, 2022 8:22 am

Wow, that's a long time. Do you have an end goal in mind (exam, travel) or are you planning to use it as long as possible?

lingua wrote:I didn't listen to the videos, however I've used italki tutors for the last 5-6 years mostly for Italian with the primary objective to get a solid hour of conversation every week as well as get any grammar questions answered. I don't do lessons. I have come across some teachers that want to do lessons but I made sure they understood up front that I'm only interested in conversing and rarely if ever had an issue with it.

I know language exchanges are available but I don't find them very effective. To many of the Italian speakers already have a high level of English and in my experience I wasn't getting a 50-50 exchange a lot of the time. For me it's worth the money because my time is limited and I'd rather not waste it with mindless chatter in English at this point in my life. As far as the rating system ... I don't care. It's really up to the student whether or not the tutor/teacher/whatever is a good fit. If you feel you're getting good value for your money then it's worth it. If you're not then it's a waste.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby luke » Tue Nov 15, 2022 10:47 am

LupCenușiu wrote:the equivalent of the d2d "encyclopedia" seller

Hm. At least one of those encyclopedias was pretty good, so the door-to-door salesman was not necessarily a huckster, but rather a young person, perhaps in college, who was trying to pay their way through, as was done in the good old days, before the financialization of education.

Perhaps it's similar with iTalki?
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby garyb » Tue Nov 15, 2022 11:20 am

On the iTalki question, I've used it a lot in the past (mainly for conversation practice rather than formal teaching, like Lingua) and found it useful, but as a non-beginner learner finding a good teacher was difficult because most cater to beginners and there wasn't a way to search for ones who don't. I did find a couple of very good tutors (including one who taught both French and Italian: two birds with one stone!), but they were Community Tutors who were just teaching part-time as a temporary gig so I ended up having to find a new one every few months.

I did try a couple of Professional tutors and didn't think they were any better for me - in fact they tended to be less suitable as they were more insistent in following a curriculum - but I suppose a good one is worth the extra money if it means you can keep working with them over a longer term.

These days regular speaking practice is less of a priority for me so it's not really worth the money, but if that changes I'll probably go back. They say time is money, and finding a good language exchange can certainly take a lot of time.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby Saim » Tue Nov 15, 2022 11:56 am

This isn't the first time we've dealt with Virtually Native's sensationalistic repackaging of hard Krashenism (where he just replaces the term "comprehensible input" with "topics" and "knowledge", making the concept somehow even vaguer):

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 00#p164418
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby rdearman » Tue Nov 15, 2022 4:50 pm

I have used iTalki for professional lessons in Korean. I used them for a year, and found them to be extremely helpful, especially for grammar instruction. I don't have a level I could speak to native speakers, although I do use language exchanges for that purpose. I spend 10 minutes or so labouring through some sentences and getting pronunciation practice. (But I do LE's all the time in all my languages).

I'm not fond of reading grammar books, so grammar instruction by a teacher was useful. He also provided vocabulary, guidance and homework. In addition, it gives you a kick of the backside, because he gave packages of 5 lessons which were 10-20% discounted; I would have 5 lessons, which I already paid for. In this area, the sunken cost fallacy was actually helpful.

Some advantages of using a professional teacher on iTalki are:
  • Tailored vocabulary and phrases to your learning needs.
  • Focus on all four aspects: reading, writing, listening, speaking.
  • The teacher can help you with grammar and syntax.
  • The teacher can help you improve your pronunciation.
  • You can progress at your own pace.
  • Get individual attention
  • Do your homework and only focus on the trouble areas.
  • Teacher can correctly assess your level in the language.
  • You can ask questions and get advice about language, culture, and places.

As someone said, if you are only interested in reading, then iTalki isn't worth it. But if you're looking to develop in all areas then having someone giving you individual attention is worth it in my opinion. Having said all that, the teacher can only show you how to fish, you have to catch the fish yourself. So you do need to put in the hours outside the lessons. But that goes for any class/course every taken.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby golyplot » Tue Nov 15, 2022 5:51 pm

I hope noone minds if I hijack the thread to ask for advice.

Suppose you've already studied reading and listening extensively and just want to develop basic conversational skills. What's the best way to do that on iTalki? So far I've done two trial lessons, but I've been pretty frustrated each time.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby BeaP » Tue Nov 15, 2022 6:15 pm

I don't think this guy is against iTalki, I think he's against most forms of language teaching. He says that language classes are usually unnatural and idiotic (like someone pointing at an armchair and saying the word 10 times). Teachers behave as if the students were fools ('love your mistakes', 'you don't need to speak correctly') and recommend activities that might be signs of mental problems ('talk to yourself'). Intelligent adults should respect themselves, opt for something more valuable and spend their time on learning new things with the help of the language. There's nothing new here. A lot of textbooks present the language as a series of topics. You learn to speak about one, then you go on the next. I don't see why this is impossible in the case of iTalki. For example if I talk with my Italian tutor about Italian art/traditions/fashion/you name it, and I also gain a lot of new information because the Italian native knows obviously a lot more than me, what's the problem? Not all teachers point at the armchair and think that students are parrots. On the contrary.
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Re: Italki- A worthy investment or a waste of money?

Postby rdearman » Tue Nov 15, 2022 6:59 pm

golyplot wrote:I hope noone minds if I hijack the thread to ask for advice.

Suppose you've already studied reading and listening extensively and just want to develop basic conversational skills. What's the best way to do that on iTalki? So far I've done two trial lessons, but I've been pretty frustrated each time.

This really does depend on the person you are talking to. I did a couple of exchanges with a guy from Belgium who "only does conversations" not lessons. Which was exactly what I wanted. The only problem I had with him is he didn't really do corrections very well. The thing about iTalki is that the tutor really needs to know what you want. If you only want to have them proofread your writing, or just talk, or just explain grammar, then you need to tell them exactly what you want up front. You don't really need trial lessons, I think you can email / PM them via the system to explain what you want and ask if they do it. It will save you a lot of time doing the pre-selection via PM/email rather than via a 30-minute trial.

You can also agree on topics in advance of the lesson. For example, "I want to discuss the purchase of foods and other consumables at a grocery store in order to help me remember the words." This actually makes the tutor's life a little easier as well since they will already know what you want to talk about, and they can think up some vocabulary, or scenarios to run you through. I remember doing a restaurant scenario with one tutor. They played the role of waiter* and I played the role of lost and floundering tourist (which I did a great job of btw).

* Please don't correct me that "waiter" should be "server". To me a server has hard-drives, network cables, a power supply and random-access-memory, and I wouldn't insult a human being by calling them a server.
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