r/iTalki

I have been taking lessons with a teacher, twice a week, for the past year. Just did a tally - and they have rescheduled our lessons at least 30 times (25 times 2+ days before the lesson so they did it via the Calendar; many times < 24hrs by sending me a message hours before the lesson).

I really enjoy this teacher. However, my schedule has gotten busier lately, and I'm struggling to accommodate them. They would mark their entire week as available (all time blocks except 8 hours every night in their timezone). I've even gone so far as creating my own availability schedule just so they know when they could reschedule a lesson to. Despite that, they would often reschedule the lesson to times that I had marked explicitly as being unavailable.

This month, I tried out a new strategy to accommodate them. I usually pull an all nighter every Friday night/Saturday evening. So I thought why not just block that entire night (morning-evening their time) just for this one. I told them that they could reschedule to any time within that Friday/Saturday (~12 hours of availability to reschedule). Nope. A new reschedule notification just came in for a Tuesday.

There it is - my rant. I enjoy lessons with this person a lot. But I'm at my wits end. If you downvote me enough times, maybe I'll snap out of it and start mass canceling my lessons.

The student was Chinese and spoke basically no English. My Chinese is maybe A2 level, and he saw that on my profile and assumed I could teach fully in Chinese. Before the lesson, I explained that I couldn’t teach in Chinese and even gave him the chance to cancel with no problem at all, but he still wanted to try using very slow/simple English.

In 30 minutes, he initially wanted:

-the difference between two verbs

-pronunciation correction for 5 words

-a lesson plan

He was also a complete beginner.

I tried my best to adapt. I made the simplest sentences possible for the verbs he asked about and even added Chinese translations to help him understand. But during the lesson he wrote in the chat that my example sentences were “difficult.”

Then later in the lesson, he suddenly asked me to teach phonetic symbols and pronunciation too, which hadn’t been part of the original request.

At the end, he asked if I had WeChat or Facebook, so now I honestly can’t even tell whether he enjoyed the lesson or not. The communication barrier was that difficult.

The problem is… I really don’t want to continue teaching him because the lessons would probably be extremely stressful every time. But I’m also scared that if I block him or refuse future lessons, he might leave me my first bad review ever.

Has anyone else dealt with students where the language barrier was just too big to make the lessons workable? How did you handle it professionally?

EDIT: I was probably not clear enough but I was teaching a language which is not English, so there were 3 languages involved here, making it more complex

Before reading this, let me stress once again that this is based on my personal experiences. Your personal experiences are definitely different than mine:

I am currently learning German. And my budget for an italki tutor would be between $20-30 per hour. I've previously enrolled in Goethe to earn my A1 cert but had to stop due to budget constraints and personal commitments. There was a time where I did not have much success in finding a suitable tutor on italki. A lot of them claimed to have "structured lessons" but most of the time they would simply whip out the Google docs and just type out sentences to translate based on any topics I could think of at the back of my head. So whenever I saw tutors' profiles stating "being flexible with your learning needs", I tend to give second thoughts.

But based on my experiences, I noticed that the ones who indeed have actual structured lessons are the non-native speakers (eg. Tutors from Ukraine, Egypt, Serbia, etc.). My theory is that these people have undergone intensive German lessons at official centres themselves, hence they know what and how things are being taught.

So with that said, if you're actively trying to learn a new language (with a certain budget), selecting tutors who are native speakers doesn't necessarily mean that they are the best teachers - unless you're looking for a casual/informal lessons for your vacational needs. At least for German, if you really want structured lessons from native speakers, you definitely have to consider tutors who are charging at a much higher rate (eg. At least $45 per hour) because most of the time, they are qualified teachers. Otherwise do give a chance to these non-German tutors because they might be the best fit for you :)

The night before a class I can feel tension running through me. I usually only get 4 hours of sleep before a class. Then I’m exhausted in the class. I’m someone who generally needs 8 hours of sleep.

The actual in-class experience has been getting gradually better with the teacher I’ve done 7 lessons with. It’s still pretty rough, but there are things I genuinely enjoy. With another teacher that I have less experience with, I’m sometimes stressed to the point that I can’t get words out or can’t understand a simple point that I would otherwise understand.

I’d welcome the perspective of either learners or teachers.

If something like this happened with you, did you just have to push through? Did something make it better? If something like this happened with some of your students, what are your thoughts?

I have been learning French and need more conversation practice.

I am interested in trying iTalki, but I wonder what would we talk about, and will it just be awkward.

I am pretty involved with sailboat racing, and ocean racing in particular.

I find myself traveling to France regularly to sail. Mostly the guys I sail with speak English, but sometimes not so well, and it would be great to be useful to converse with them about sailing in French.

I was thinking that if I found a French tutor who sails, we would have something to talk about, so it wouldn't be awkward, and I would learn the lingo. I can learn the vocabulary from French learn to sail books, but the phrases that people actually use are not necessarily in the books.

Anyway - i put "sailing" and a few other terms into the search bar on italki for french instructors, but didn't find anyone.

Hi everyone,

I’d really appreciate your advice because I’m honestly a bit frustrated with my experience on italki so far.

I’m currently around B1 level in english, and my goal is to reach B2, especially for professional conversations and being more confident speaking. So I decided to invest in lessons.

The problem is: I’ve already tried lessons with two different tutors, both with excellent reviews… but the experience was honestly terrible.

The first tutor joined the lesson with no preparation at all. He didn’t ask about my goals, my level, nothing. He was literally sitting on his couch, using his phone, and just talking casually. It didn’t feel like a lesson at all.

The second tutor wanted to do grammar, but again, no preparation. He just opened a random website and spent the whole hour reading examples out loud with zero explanation. I was honestly close to leaving the lesson.

So now I’m questioning everything.

- Should I avoid “community tutors” and only choose professional teachers?

- Is there really a big difference between a tutor and a teacher in practice?

- How do YOU personally choose a good teacher?

Because reviews don’t seem reliable — everyone has 5 stars, but the actual quality varies a lot.

I’m looking for someone structured, who prepares lessons, adapts to my level, and actually helps me progress toward B2.

If you’ve been in the same situation and found a good approach, I’d love to hear how you did it.

Thanks a lot 🙏

Hi everyone! I applied to become an italki Community Tutor for Korean on May 4, and the application page said they would get back within 10 business days. It hasn’t been 10 business days yet, so I know I’m still within the normal waiting period, but I was just wondering about other tutors’ experiences.

For those who applied recently, did italki usually take close to the full 10 business days to respond? Or did some people hear back earlier?

Thanks in advance! I’m just curious because I’m getting a little nervous while waiting haha.

My alert on my phone came 15 minutes after the lesson started. I only blame myself. I've agreed to refund the credits to my student​ and I apologised, but my word that has crushed my whole morning​

I tried, but the italki interface was confusing. What I saw resembled a very old school message board, which was not what I expected. Am I missing something? Did I go to the wrong place on the site? Thanks for any and all help.

EDIT: To clarify, I was under the impression that a Spanish speaker learning English (for example) could match up with an English speaker learning Spanish — outside of the paid lessons.

I’m a Spanish teacher and I recently ran into a situation that made me wonder how other teachers handle this.

I charge $25 for a 1-hour individual lesson. One of my students suddenly started attending lessons together with her boyfriend under the same individual lesson package.

Later she asked me to open a 90-minute slot for both of them together, still under individual pricing.

At first I didn’t think too much about it, but then I realized I honestly don’t feel very comfortable regularly teaching two people for the price and format of one private lesson. For me, even on a beginner level, teaching two students changes the dynamic: divided attention, different pacing, managing two people instead of one, etc.

The student disagrees and says tutoring should be priced only according to time, not according to the number of students, especially at a basic level.

So now I’m genuinely curious: How do other language teachers handle this on italki or similar platforms? Do you allow two students in one individual lesson for the same price, or do you create separate pricing for pairs?

Well, I am a complete noob at Italki. I just finished my first class on there, and I was very disappointed. The teacher Maggie (won't give her last name) was less than helpful.

After a super brief intro, what's your name where do you come from? We dove right into bland textbook hsk vocabulary lists. I told her before hand my focus was intermediate conversation... She had me making sentences, which is fine. But there was little to no positive reinforcement. Hardly an indication of if the word was used correctly. She simply repeated what I had said.

It was very awkward and felt so forced. Like it was her first time teaching, yet she claims 16 years of experience.

Although her pronunciation was good (she's a native speaker) there was hardly any enthusiasm there. I thought the trial lesson was supposed to "sell" you. Maybe I am wrong.

Not everyone is skilled at humor and it is more of an art form, but the air was thick. A little brevity could have gone a long way. 30 minutes felt like a couple hours.

Without any positive reinforcement and little to no engagement, I saw hardly any enjoyment to be found. I know not all teachers are this way. I pray they are not. It's just difficult to understand where the teacher was coming from...

I even asked at one point, how will you teach conversation. She simply said, "I will give you a vocabulary word and you make a sentence." Okay. So in this case, the fundamental idea of two-way communication is totally flawed. Why even have a teacher? Why not just do AI slop drills??? What did I sign up for?

Side note: In her profile, she stated very clearly she taught speaking as well, not just vocabulary. So I feel like I took the wrong bus to some random stop, in random ville. ;)

https://preview.redd.it/cqigqj1dma0h1.png?width=608&format=png&auto=webp&s=d79ffba58a5508d7ebc358b8df92458f3d2a8a20

Hello i've been having some lessons on Italki for close to 7 months now. When the new classroom appeared i was disappointed about the whiteboard not being there for a while and now that it's back, it's worse than it was before and pretty disappointing... Got 2 issues today :
- First we couldn't increase the textbox size horizontally neither me or my teacher and when we did it would stretch the text as if it was an image...
- Second is that i can only see it when they were done writing and no update in real time etc wich means for big textboxes i could only see at the end not as they would write...
To me it's pretty disappointing and i wondered if anyone else had this kind of issues or not and if there is some plans for fixing.

Once upon a time, there was a profitable little magical kingdom ruled by a mean Queen named Cambly. She ruled her vassals (the tutors) with an iron hand and low pay for more than ten years. One day, she was feeling so guilty about it that she decided it was time to give them the raise they deserved. She consulted her noble advisors on how she could pay them more without spending a single dime.

After many discussions, the main advisor came up with a brilliant idea: “Let’s create a new category of vassals called Pro vassals, and let’s pay them a little more.”

The Queen yelled, “Pay a little more? I don’t want to pay anything more! That’s why I have advisors like you!”

Quickly, the advisor replied, “Don’t worry, Your Majesty, you won’t pay more—the people (the students) will!”

“And how are we going to convince them to pay more?” she argued.

“That’s easy, Your Majesty. We’ll promise personalized classes with feedback from only the elite—the chosen ones!”

“Are you sure they’re going to believe that? After all, it will still be the same old thing: people wanting to chat in broken English. Besides, many don’t want to learn anything; they just want someone to talk to in these dark times!”

“Don’t worry, Your Majesty. They will. People almost want to be fooled—they want to believe!”

A year passed, and the Queen summoned her advisor. “How is the Cambly Pro project going?”

“It’s going perfectly well, Your Majesty. Many students have already moved to the Pro plan, and now we are moving to Phase 2.”

“What is Phase 2?” the Queen asked.

“Everyone will become Pro, and everyone will have to pay more for the same product. Congratulations, Your Majesty—you did it! You gave the tutors their deserved raise without spending a dime.”

The Queen clapped her hands in irrepressible joy. “Congratulations, team! You are brilliant! But tell me—did everyone really agree to pay 50% more for the same class?”

“Almost everyone,” said the advisor. “A few left for other kingdoms—Italki, Preply—where they say they can find equal or better work. But we’ve made it difficult for departures.”

In a dark room, a tutor packed their bag. Years of "iron rule" had left them with nothing but low pay and a "Pro" rejection letter. The Queen had doubled the price for students, but the job hadn't changed: it was still just endless small talk and unpaid prep. When a regular student messaged saying they couldn't afford the new fee, the tutor shut their laptop. Their hands shook with a choice: stay a nameless servant or find a place that actually cared.

Word got around fast. Some students stayed for the "elite" hype, but others just vanished. As the best tutors headed for the border, the Queen’s bank account grew fatter.

Months later, a report about the "unhappy staff" landed on the throne. The Queen tossed it into the fire without a second thought. The kingdom kept humming along—profitable and quiet—while its best voices slipped away to neighboring lands.

Hi everyone,

I am a Japanese teacher on italki, and I am a little confused about how the “Business” category is supposed to work.

I do not have a degree or certification in business management, finance, marketing, etc. However, I do have professional work experience in IT and other fields in Japan. I also have experience with Japanese job interviews, workplace communication, keigo, resume checking, and practical communication used in Japanese companies.

I contacted italki support, and they explained that the Business category requires qualifications or proof of experience related to business fields. That part makes sense to me.

But my real question is this:

If I do NOT teach business management or academic business subjects, can I still teach things like:

• Japanese interview preparation
• workplace Japanese
• keigo for work
• resume checking
• communication in Japanese companies

under the General Japanese category instead?

Are other teachers already doing this?

I would really appreciate hearing about your experiences or how you handle this on italki.

Hello! So I have a lot of students after 3 months, and have made about 2000$. It is however not enough to sustain me when doing this full time. I have increased my prices from 14$-16$ pr hour, and kept my conversation lessons at 14$ since they require less work for me.

Should I send a message about this to all my students? And should I inform them that the conversation classes are more affordable since I am not preparing material and they are not as demanding? Or should I just see how this month goes and decrease them again if necessary? I am working on iTalki pretty much full time.

Thanks everyone.

As a teacher, do you appreciate when your long time students buy your discounted lesson packages or no?

Hey all,

is there an option to disable that tutors see whether you have visited their profile or not? I looked at some tutor profiles and now some of them wrote me asking if I'm interested in taking lessons with them, which is actually not the case (I appreciate the effort, but I prefer to be the proactive one). I don't want them to be left on read, so I answer them, but it's a bit annoying nonetheless.

Thank you in advance.