Italki Review: A powerful app to learn Languages, How efficient is it with Spanish?
Online language tutoring is getting a lot of attention from Language learners and it’s becoming a very good and effective way to practice speaking and listening skills in other languages, it’s also a cool way to meet awesome and inspiring people from all over the world!
Last week I shared with you everything about how the platform for Language learning named Preply works and I can’t give a review of Preply without also giving an opinion on its number 1 competitor which is Italki,
Italki is one of the top platforms for learning a language online. Whether you’re a beginner or already fluent, there are Italki tutors for everyone. In the same way as my Preply review, I wanted to give a very detailed review about Italki, so created my account and started my small journey! I had some live sessions with a very sweet Spanish teacher Lizzie!
My name is Thomas Rogers and I hope you’re doing Muy Bien! I hope that you’re ready for this great Language learning Platform review!
In this Italki review, I will show you the following topics:
- What is Italki?
- How Italki Works.
- Prices.
- What I Like about Italki.
- What Could be Better?
- Other alternatives to Italki.
- Italki Review Conclusion.
What is Italki?
Just like Preply, Italki is a website that connects language students with private tutors for 1 on 1 Language Learning lessons. Language lessons take place online on platforms like Skype or Zoom. all you need is an account, a device, a good internet connection, and motivation to keep on learning!
How Italki Works:
The main feature of Italki is that it gives you three options for tutoring:
- To have 1–1 Tutoring with Professional Teachers (Certified, a little bit expensive).
- To have 1–1 Tutoring with Community members (not certified tutors, more affordable).
- And my favorite: to have a Language exchange with members of the community (FOR FREE!)
Some tutoring platforms have outdated search features that make it hard to find a good tutor. That’s not the case at all with Italki. You can easily search and filter tutors to find your perfect match. You can filter tutors by:
- Where they’re from
- Other languages they speak
- Their lesson prices
- Availability
- Category (Kids, Business, Test Prep, etc.)
- Whether they’re a native speaker or not
- Professional Teacher vs Community Tutor
And the best thing is that you can select the type of lesson you want to get, there are a lot of them to pick from:
- Conversation practice.
- Pronunciation lesson.
- Grammar lesson.
- Orthography lesson.
- Reading lesson.
- Auditive comprehension lesson.
- Writing lesson.
As I said, the platform has a lot of tutors from all over the world, and the platform has a wide range of languages available, Prices of tutors can vary depending on the language, but fortunately, Spanish is the cheaper of them all, but if you would like to practice, for example, Japanese, the rates are a little bit higher.
1–1 lessons are a great way to practice your Pronunciation and Listening, but, is it really cost-effective?
Prices: Cost‐Effectiveness of using Italki for Learning Languages.
One thing that makes it stand out is that you can get a trial lesson with each teacher for a much better rate than their normal class rate, though I would like it to have it for free, the minimum that teachers charge for a trial lesson is $5, you won’t get your money back if you don’t like the teacher. This allows you to actually go through a bunch of trial lessons at first and find which teacher works in a way that is going to help your needs best, but it can hurt your pocket, so be careful.
I’m a person who always thinks about the cost of things first, don’t want to throw away hard-earned money, and I think you don’t want it either, is it really worth it to pay around $15 ~ $20 for a meeting in Italki? It would be okay for a couple of times, but in the long run, it will sum up a lot of money, Isn’t there any other way to talk to people for free?
There are actually other ways to talk to people totally for free, but you won’t get the same results, Italki is actually a very good platform if you want to have a scheduled meeting with someone that WILL listen to you, and WILL assist you from any problem you might have, which takes us to the next point to talk about.
It’s important to point out that you will get what you pay for, if you pay $5 for a teacher, it is most probable that you will only get conversational practices, but not grammar, or orthography lessons
Who can get more benefit from this; kids, beginners, or advanced learners?
I won’t recommend you to start when you’re a really really beginner, you will get overwhelmed with a lot of corrections, have difficulty listening and understanding the tutor, and you won’t have enough confidence to speak.
I suggest you start when you have enough knowledge and confidence to have a conversation and share ideas, an Intermediate level, which is around B1 level of Spanish, then you can start having meetings over Italki, that way you will get more the most of it in each meeting.
It is also important to have a good microphone, good headphones, and a good internet connection, so you won’t have any problems when communicating.
What I Like about Italki.
- Class cancelation can be made 24 hours prior to the class, any cancellation within 24 hours won’t be allowed, this gives each party enough time to reschedule the lesson.
- Great Community — Articles made by teachers, podcasts, forums, and exercises made by teachers.
- Lessons from professional teachers and native speakers people who will help you and assist you.
What Could be Better?
- Tricky to sync the Italki calendar to Apple or Google calendar.
- The quality of lessons varies between tutors.
- Confusing credits system.
- Not recommendable for people with a deficient knowledge of the language.
- No free trial to try what teacher fits the needs of the user.
- Can be expensive in the long run
Italki Review Conclusion.
To be honest, I think that Italki is an ok platform, you might not need any other platform to have 1–1 conversation with native speakers, but let it not be your 100% language solution, cause the teachers won’t guide you on grammar or language techniques, most of the time teachers are looking to test your conversation skills, so you can enroll to other Spanish programs to completely surround yourself with the language.
You can use other apps to have a full experience of learning, perhaps you can add Duolingo to learn new vocabulary, and also subscribe to a proper language course, like SpanishVIP I suggest you check that out!
I want to give a heads up and say that I’m not paid or sponsored by anyone, but if you want to support me, you can sign-up to Italki and start your journey there by using this link, it will give me a free Portuguese class each time you book a class there, so it’s a win-win-win!
That’s everything for today! I hope this review was informative or helpful in any shape or form. a quick disclaimer, This is a 3rd party opinion review. All opinions are my own and do not constitute facts. You should review the solutions yourself to come to a conclusion about whether or not you should use them. I am not legally responsible for any decisions that a reader should make as none of my opinions constitute advice, they are simply opinions about my research and/or use of these tools.
