italki: How was your experience?

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Re: italki: How was your experience?

Postby Arnaud » Mon Jan 21, 2019 6:24 am

Cavesa wrote: I highly doubt there will be many people explaining me what is formally wrong about my compte rendu there, or how to write a story with better and more natural style.
I doubt you can find that on Italki. It's more a writing workshop thing, that you're looking for, and in french, these things are rather rare. Anyway, there are a few books like "les tendons du style" that could help you (the author wrote a whole series of books on the subject where he repeats himself a lot, take a look on amazon)
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Re: italki: How was your experience?

Postby Cavesa » Mon Jan 21, 2019 6:39 am

Thanks for a very good post, Iceberg!

It is great to hear more about the offer of italki teachers for the non mainstream languages. Is it a coincidence, that your better experiences seem to be with those, and the worse one with the teachers of the more mainstream languages? I am just wildly guessing here, but perhaps the teachers of languages like Latvian or Burmese simply value every learner more, as they know there are not such huge crowds right behind the corner. A Spanish teacher doesn't need to worry that a lost student won't be replaced.

It looks like the complaints and praise seem to be similar among various members. And they are mostly not that different from those from use of in person tutors, I'd say. Such as reading during the paid time, different activities and content than previously agreed etc.

A lot of things wouldn't be a problem at all, if the teacher presented the reality without false promises.
Why are so many people claiming to be flexible and able to adapt to every student's needs? Well, in some case, it is true only as long as the student doesn't actually want any adapting. But why don't they advertise having some proven methods and resources they find good instead?
If someone wants audio lessons and is uncomfortable with video, perhaps they could say so, and might find similar students, who also don't like videos.

Not reading the information from the student is really irresponsible. Rescheduling and technical problems are possible (I was lucky one of those teachers I tried was patient as Skype suddenly stopped working at the time of the lesson's start. It had worked several hours before.), but what you describe is really too much.

A non native teacher is also not a problem, unless they claim to be a native. Every learner should have the choice and know what they are paying for.

Truth be told, I think that the pdfs named like John_american_food_october are a problem, if this habit spreads. I think it is a bit rude post something with that name to Julia_swedish in May. I also don't think it is completely ok as far as personal data goes, but perhaps I am being a bit too sensitive here (it is about the principle. an american Joe learning Spanish is common. But a czech Stanislav learning Burmese is not). If the pdf was Food1.pdf for everyone, it would look better. Also, the bigger problem is sending those to someone who has previously specified they want to do something really different.

Iceberg wrote:Differently from most students, I provided an honest feedback, which has never been shown on Italki websites. I have given 1 to 5 stars, but never above 3 to Chinese tutors because I never got what was agreed before the lesson.
...
However, they have NOT shown on the website my 1 star and my honest feedback on each tutor. I don't want to bash any tutor, but I provide an honest feedback, so that he or she can learn from their mistakes. Everyone can change and that was for them to change. They need to be more professionals and be punctual, reduce the amount of rescheduling etc.e a video-lesson. Be honest, after all.
....
The best tutors I have had, had lower ratings. The ones with 5 ratings were the worst ones. So, I also don't follow any ratings.


So, it is possible that italki filters the reviews and leaves only the useless ones? Unless you give four or five stars and write a positive message containing no real information (or positive message containing good info, if you are an exception), the message will be deleted? And the better teachers are perhaps less likely to get that many awesome reviews, as the main target audience is probably looking for the exact opposite than what we've been talking about here.

Such censorship would be a really unfair thing to do. It is sad, if italki is not building business on high quality service (which means learning from feedback and even filtering the teachers based on it) but instead of lack of information.

I don't find it improbable, that the overall impression of the user reviews (that several people mentioned in this thread) may be caused by the fact that we tend to be exactly the kind of learner who will get censored. The more experienced a learner is, the less likely they are to be completely uncritical and easily excited.

Kraut wrote:https://de.verbling.com/lehrer/shey

Yes, Verbling has much better profiles. And this teacher actually looks tempting, even though I need to fit other stuff in my budget now.
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Re: italki: How was your experience?

Postby lingua » Mon Jan 21, 2019 6:47 am

For Italian I've had my share of teachers that wanted to use lessons but for the most part they've been adaptable to just talking which is my primary objective. More recently I want feedback on my writing but I'm lucky enough to have a long time teacher who is willing to do that.

It's probably beneficial to keep in mind that most of these teachers/tutors are only trying to supplement their income since in my experience some already have jobs albeit part time in some cases. I've only had a few that do this as their only job.

I would be willing to try Verbling out but I have this feeling there will be a lot of the same teachers on it though I haven't checked yet.
Last edited by lingua on Tue Jan 22, 2019 4:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: italki: How was your experience?

Postby Cavesa » Mon Jan 21, 2019 7:02 am

Arnaud wrote:
Cavesa wrote: I highly doubt there will be many people explaining me what is formally wrong about my compte rendu there, or how to write a story with better and more natural style.
I doubt you can find that on Italki. It's more a writing workshop thing, that you're looking for, and in french, these things are rather rare. Anyway, there are a few books like "les tendons du style" that could help you (the author wrote a whole series of books on the subject where he repeats himself a lot, take a look on amazon)


Yes, and that is exactly the problem. There is absolutely no such a writing workshop. These skills are tested in the DALF, and they are expected from you, if you transfer to the French education system from another one. So, I am not making up unrealistic nonsense. Yet, the whole teaching industry seems to pretend so. Perhaps DALF C2 wouldn't be such an exception and "miracle" reserved almost exclusively for people who have lived in the country and been partially educated there, if there were actually people and books teaching the skills. Just look at English, CPE is definitely rarer than the lower levels, but it is not such a unicorn.

Thanks for the book tip. There are actually really few resources, considering how complex the subject is. Perhaps such a book could help.

And every time I bring this up somewhere, I get the advice to get a teacher from at least one person. There are people even in this community who have so positive experience with teachers that they are even very unpleasant about my doubts, they consider the teachers to be a panacea. I can remember one forum member, who reacts to everything with "get a tutor" and takes any criticism of tutors as pride and lack of common sense of the learner. So, where are those superhelpful teachers that could solve my problem?

I think they are mostly lazy (just having a chat with someone is an easier way to make money than helping them analyse writing and improve it) or incompetent. Explaining the present tense to a newbie learner is much simpler.

There are no writing workshops for advanced French learners that I could find either online or in the parts of the real world accessible to me (I didn't even find writing focused classes in the country). There are some writing workshops for natives, sure, but group activities like this could make me feel very guilty about bringing the overall level down and having different problems from theirs. There is one writing focused class in the Institut Français in Prague (the AF is named like that) but it is not run every year and it is for lower levels only.

The "pay a teacher on italki" advice is very widely spread on the language learning internet. Well, it is obviously stupid advice in some cases, as it doesn't take into account at all that italki is focusing on a part of the market and doesn't care about lots of more specific needs. It would be an ideal platform to cover various things, and it is big enough for it.

I think that is part of the problem. There is very little diversity.
Based on having read lots of the profiles of French, Spanish, Italian learners, I would say most of the teachers are mostly clones of one.
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Re: italki: How was your experience?

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Jan 21, 2019 9:02 am

languist wrote:How often did you study? How long were your lessons? Which type of lesson/teacher did you prefer? Was your time on italki helpful? What was most helpful? What made your favourite tutor stand out to you? What did you find detrimental during your lessons?


I've had several teachers and tutors in iTalki. Primarily for Hebrew, Tibetan and German.

When I was actively using it I was scheduling 1 class per language per week. Some weeks it was the only type of studying I was doing but in general I was spending 3 times as much offline. So for every hour in a lesson, I'd spend about 2-3 hours studying.

The type of lessons and teachers I looked for are teachers and not tutors. My experience with tutors has been less than stellar. Issues with methodology or trying to make me feel guilty about my commitment some weeks led to me closing some interactions.

I feel my time and commitment to the teachers I did use was extremely helpful. What I appreciated the most with my teachers was going through structured dialogues and workbooks - typically one on one lessons using material intended as teaching material. Along with that material, we also do regular conversation work. You might think that this is something any tutor or exchange could do, but a language teacher can answer my questions. In particular, one teacher typed parts of all of our conversations in a shared google doc as we work.

The only parts that I found detrimental were when the material being used was at a level well beyond mine. That issue is easily managed when doing a short review on what works and what doesn't with the teacher every few weeks.

Obviously, a few times technical issues occurred over time and we had to reschedule classes. Flexibility with that generally resulted in longer working relations with me.

And my favourite teachers have a life and personal interests and passions - they bring that into the classroom, it makes for better conversation work.
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Re: italki: How was your experience?

Postby tarvos » Mon Jan 21, 2019 9:34 am

As someone who teaches on iTalki, this thread is invaluable to me as a source of feedback. I get LOADS of different people and requests, and it really depends on who you have in front of you.

I use both lesson plans and more active conversation lessons (that last part is my favourite one to do). I also LOVE it when people write me a message with specifics, because that makes my job so much easier (I know what to expect and prepare).

The takeaway for the teacher is to be very adaptable and to really listen to what your student needs. I find that the students that stick with me the longest are those who know what they want, and are vocal about communicating it.
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Re: italki: How was your experience?

Postby Axon » Mon Jan 21, 2019 10:09 am

Tarvos (and other iTalki teachers), can you expand a little bit on what you mean by active conversation lessons?

It's been a long time since I did any general conversation lessons over video/voice call. IELTS has been my only market for about five months, and I have a method that works pretty well across levels. I read about IELTS learning strategies a lot and try to incorporate that as much as I can, and of course I bring my own learning experience into the classes. I definitely see improvement, though not many of my students have actually sat the test yet and I know my methods can always improve.

Anyway I've grown very partial to the types of questions that IELTS asks and I would love to practice and learn how to answer that type of thing in the languages I'm learning. How should I indicate that? Would it be presumptuous to send the tutor a list of sample questions?
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Re: italki: How was your experience?

Postby garyb » Mon Jan 21, 2019 10:50 am

I've taken lessons through iTalki on and off over the years. I've not had any particularly negative experiences, but I can agree with some of the points in this thread. I find tutoring most useful at a high-intermediate or advanced level, but that's a niche market: not many tutors cater to more advanced learners, at least not in languages like French and Italian that everyone and their dog wants to learn but relatively few reach a decent level in, and iTalki doesn't make it easy to find those who do.

At this level, I'm not looking for formal teaching or exam preparation, but I do want something that'll push me out of my comfort zone more than typical everyday chats with native-speaker friends or language exchange partners. Not all tutors can find this balance. I've found it most useful when we've focused on one or a few specific subjects (current events, books, films, etc.) although without sticking to them too rigidly, allowing space for tangents and more informal discussion. Corrections are also important, since I'm one of these strange people who actually tries to listen to and learn from them.

Some tutors believe that advanced teaching begins and ends with idiomatic expressions, and have just bombarded me with semi-obscure ones because all this "new material" gives both parties an impression that progress is being made. Idioms certainly have their importance, but they're something I can learn in my own time and there's much more to improving fluency. I'm also wary of tutors who are full of praise for my level, as it's a sign that they focus on beginners and don't have experience with more advanced learners, although it's a warning rather than a deal-breaker and I'll still give them a chance.

I've found that the only significant difference between "community" and "professional" tutors - other than price - is that the community ones are just teaching temporarily between other jobs or studies while the professional ones tend to be in it for the long haul. Sadly I've had a couple of excellent community tutors who stopped teaching after a few months because they got a "real" job, and since then I've paid the extra just to have someone whom I could potentially work with in the long-term. That said, my most recent professional tutor (for Spanish) increased her prices by a dollar or two every month and I just found it was getting too much, especially since it's a less advanced language for me and I just wanted conversation practice.

I'd love to find a teacher who can help me with pronunciation, but I might as well look for a unicorn.

Cavesa wrote:The "pay a teacher on italki" advice is very widely spread on the language learning internet.
This is partly due to their affiliate programme. As soon as that was introduced, every language blogger was suddenly extolling the virtues of iTalki lessons for everyone from absolute beginners upwards.
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Re: italki: How was your experience?

Postby tarvos » Mon Jan 21, 2019 11:26 am

Axon wrote:

Anyway I've grown very partial to the types of questions that IELTS asks and I would love to practice and learn how to answer that type of thing in the languages I'm learning. How should I indicate that? Would it be presumptuous to send the tutor a list of sample questions?


No. You make my job easier, so anytime you come up with stuff, I am happy.
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Re: italki: How was your experience?

Postby Cavesa » Mon Jan 21, 2019 11:44 am

tarvos wrote:As someone who teaches on iTalki, this thread is invaluable to me as a source of feedback. I get LOADS of different people and requests, and it really depends on who you have in front of you.

I use both lesson plans and more active conversation lessons (that last part is my favourite one to do). I also LOVE it when people write me a message with specifics, because that makes my job so much easier (I know what to expect and prepare).

The takeaway for the teacher is to be very adaptable and to really listen to what your student needs. I find that the students that stick with me the longest are those who know what they want, and are vocal about communicating it.


As you are an experienced teacher there, could you share something from the other side, please? Has your experience teaching on italki been different from that in person or through other platforms?

What are the usual specifics people ask for?
Have you encountered any unusual challenge?

Is there something people should perhaps ask for more? Or the opposite, anything one definitely shouldn't expect?

Do you get to read all the feedback by the learners, or just a part of it that gets to your profile page perhaps through some filters? Can you, as a teacher, affect which reviews are being published?

Does Italki interact with the teachers in any other way than just being the eshop? For example giving overall feedback based on the reviews and kicking some out, or verifying the degrees and other such claims of the teachers?
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