Honest review on Lingoda
Hi all! I'm on A1 French course on Lingoda and have been studying intensely for the last couple of months. I wanted to share my experience on Lingoda and would love to hear how other's use it as well.
I think Lingoda is fundamentally great as an idea. Flexible syllabus, you pick the time and there is no burden of missed classes as you can catch up at any point. It's great to get as many classes as your schedule allows. You get a lot of speaking practice while learning grammar, phrases, words related to the topic and if you study on your own as well you'll improve a lot. But the quality of your experience will be pure luck most of the time.
Here are my main issues with Lingoda:
1- The burden of subscription. If your credits start piling up, you don't have an easy option of pausing till you can get back. Your subscription needs to be active for you to use up your credits. On top of that they don't charge you on the same day every month, it'll be earlier and earlier each month. They first charged me 31st of the month and now it's 15th. Expect to be charged 2 times a month.
2- Can't select teachers. The only option platform guarantees is you can schedule the time you want for the topic you want. But a bad teacher can ruin the experience and you'll leave with no knowledge. I've lost several credits to bad teachers that left me frustrated. When I only tried to book with the teachers I loved, they can just assign a different teacher without any notification and you'll not be able to cancel the class. This creates instability as the pdf's are nothing without a good teacher. They should either test teachers very well and rise the quality or I should be able to get credit back or cancel the class if I don't want the teacher.
3- If you live in North America or a non-Europe time zone, you'll have even less options to pick from. Most of the native teachers will not have classes that are not at 3AM for North America.
4- Their focus of integrating AI or classroom is great, but I think they should always deliver the core idea. Get quality teachers and actually be flexible, not just hook people on a subscription. Also was asked consent that our videos and audio will be used to train AI and if you don't consent, you'll not have access to those features as a paid user.
Despite these I'll stick with it until I finish my credits and find a better structured platform. I'd appreciate any suggestions for a structured self learning platform.