r/iTalki

how many classes a week and for how long do you find is ideal for class length? ... im trying to learn Russian if that matters

Dear all,

I have a question for all of you teachers on Italki regarding the pricing of packages. I have seen that my tutor is offering a huge discount on 20x 30 minute lessons (around 20%), but not that much for 10x 60 minute lessons (only around 10%), even though, mathematically, it is the same amount of time.

Why do you think are they doing this? I guess by completing two 30 minutes lessons, their lesson count appears higher, which could be good for them because the more lessons, the better to attract new students, right?

However, I feel a bit bad taking advantage of this pricing. I really appreciate my tutor and don't want to be a cheapskate, knowing that Italki is also taking commissions...

Probably I'm overthinking this, but I'd like to hear your perspective on this matter.

Hi there, I paid for a first lesson and the teacher doesn´t show up... What can i do now?

Hey! First of all, I've always been against online classes for toddlers due to a lot of reasons but long story short: I need money 🥹

So I ended up accepting 30-minute lessons for a 3 yo boy. He's the sweetest and his mom is always with him but sometimes it's too hard for me to find material and know what to do because his attention span is short (totally normal)

His mom says it's ok if read him some books or just talk to him while he plays with his toys but even so... Sometimes I just run out of things to say.

Do you have any tips? Please don't be judgmental

I've been thinking about something that I can't get out of my head.

When you're teaching via video call, there's this invisible sync that happens between a great teacher and their student. You start picking up on tiny signals — the way they hesitate before answering, the words they choose, how they repeat your explanation back to you — and you adjust how you explain things accordingly.

But here's my question: how long does it take you to figure out how a specific student's mind works? And do you ever finish a session genuinely unsure whether they actually understood — or just nodded along?

I'm not talking about quiz results. I mean that gut feeling mid-session where you can't tell if the confusion is with the concept, your explanation style, or something else entirely.

Would love to hear how experienced teachers handle this. Especially those teaching 1-on-1 online.

Edit : they answered to me and sent me my money back !

Original post : I've been teaching on italki for a few years. These past years i've been pretty inactive due to my employement situation but i've kept one student and give lessons a few times a year.

Anyway, last time she asked me for a lesson, i wasn't able to invite her to the classroom. I realized m'y teacher profile was not active anymore, probably due to inactivity. Which i can understand...

But i had some money like 25 USD on my account. Yes it's not a lot, it's less than the minimum they ask to withdraw your money, but still i would like to get my money back if they're closing my account ! I wrote to support but no answers for now.

Has this happened to anyone? How did you do ? Any advice for this situation ?
Thanks !

I took a trial lesson with him 3 years ago. Since then I've graduated with my bachelor's. Now that I have more time in my hands I want to take lessons with him. But since then, the email I used was hacked and I had to delete it. I forgot his name, but he was in his 50s but looked really young. He was a lawyer. He had a full head of grey hair. I think his name started with a k. He had to get knee surgery right after our trial lesson. Does anyone know who I am talking about?

I have been recently trying to find a tutor for my TCF preparation, and my experience has been really disappointing so far. For some context, I have been studying French at the Alliance Francais for over a year and I met so many experience with incredible teachers, so maybe my bar is a bit high as well. I turned to Italki because it is more flexible, and I was hoping to find someone more exam-focused.

At first, I tried someone with a lot of student reviews. While she was helpful at first by making me familiar with the exam template, there were multiple red flags that were hard to ignore, such as giving me entirely AI-generated exercises, getting defnsive when I pointed out there was something wrong with the materials she gave me, and had no consistency in week-to-week teaching (e.g., saying she would correct something offline and never did), and most abusrdly, suggesting I had a reading disorder after knowing me for just a month. I do struggle with pronunciation sometimes, but I think that's not professional to just throw this concept out there randomly...

Recently, I also just tried someone with great reviews, and during the first lesson, I asked her about her lesson plan, and she immediately got defensive, emphasizing that she had 7 years of experience teaching, and this was how it worked. I had to explain that that's something I asked every teacher during the first lesson...

At this point, I am not sure if I am the problem or not, because I am seeing so, so many positive reviews under those teachers. Those are not short sentences -but long, extensive praises! Actually, I realized I seemed to have a better experience with community tutors for conversational practice, who charge less and also seem to less rude...

I am just curious to know if that's a common experience or if that's only me.

BTW If you have a great TCF tutor, feel free to suggest!

Any advice on the best ways to gain new students? Profile optimization, using teacher tools like quizzes, podcasts and vocabulary? Instant lessons?

Any suggestions and ideas are welcome

Hello everybody!

I would like to start doing iTalki in September, although I will also be studying at quite a high pace, and therefore I’m considering only putting up slots for 5-10 hours a week where I can teach my language (Swedish). The reason I want to start already is because I would like to try to build up to an okay hourly rate over the year, after which I think I’ll do it full-time. Does this make sense? Or will the algorithms screw me over because I’m going to be offering relatively few hours?

Any input will be greatly appreciated!

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.

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 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

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?

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 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 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.

We've been together for over a year. This weekend will be a milestone lesson for me, then I'll take a few weeks off, and so will she. For context, we are quite close, and we're both women. She has worked for my schedule so many times and frequently gives me more time than what I booked, so I want to show my appreciation.

I want to gift a present, but I'm not sure what is appropriate. She lives in Spain. Is an Amazon gift card to the Spanish store an appropriate present? If so, how much? Is 100 euros reasonable? I'm not European, so I don't want to cause any awkwardness or send an inappropriate present